Anvil
Purdue University is the home of Anvil, a powerful new supercomputer that provides advanced computing capabilities to support a wide range of computational and data-intensive research, from traditional high-performance computing to modern artificial intelligence applications. The name "Anvil" reflects the Purdue Boilermakers' strength and dedicated focus on producing results.
Current REU Projects
In each research project students will work closely with a member of our staff. The projects will be in a wide variety of areas, including data analytics, high performance computing, DevOps, and containerization.

Integrate the XALT job-level usage activity monitoring tool into XDMoD reporting for deeper analysis of workloads.

Implement direct cloud burst from Anvil to Azure for HPC and accelerator workloads based on the work with Microsoft in 2022.

Connect the Anvil composable subsystem’s Rancher management platform to Azure Kubernetes Service to support elastic-scaling of workloads for science gateway applications.

Develop deployment solutions for the Jupyter notebook and Rstudio interactive computing platforms on Anvil’s composable subsystem for education and training activities.
Past REU Projects
Summer 2022
Projects focused on improving data collection and reporting of the Anvil cluster to ensure quality of service, effective system utilization, and performance.
While benchmarking compute and storage performance, students:
- Learned concepts surrounding benchmarking of HPC systems, including HPL, HPCG, STREAM, and IO500
- Measured performance of Anvil's compute nodes, GPU nodes, scratch, project, and BeeOND filesystems
- Established baselines for system performance for a continuous measurement framework
To improve data collection and reporting, students:
- Configured multiple modules on Anvil's XDMoD instance and improved data collection and reporting of system metrics
- PCP, SUPREMM
- Open OnDemand data collection
- Continuous measurement framework via Application Kernels
For system environmental measurements, students:
- Created monitoring of Anvil's power consumption at the node and rack levels using Prometheus and Grafana
Fall 2022
Enhance Anvil's cybersecurity posture, utilizing an NSF CICI-funded intrusion detection system to monitor aspects of Anvil's network and enable visualization-driven insights into network traffic and cybersecurity alerts. Students helped with:
- Visualization of network traffic trends on Anvil and Purdue networks
- Dashboard development based on Zeek IDS protocol logs (TCD, UDP, SSH, HTTP)
- Port scanning
- Per-host traffic visualization
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Anvil is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2005632.