The devices tendered for the “Socio-Physical Advanced Research Cloud Infrastructure” (SPARCI) project are a cloud-based environment for researching the intelligent link between physical objects and their virtual environment in socio-technical and cyber-physical systems. In this context, this environment should be used for the joint and individual investigation of research questions from the areas of enterprise information research, e-government and web science.

The basic device forms a computer cluster whose computing and storage resources are used to collect, administer, store, share, use and analyze the data collected from real objects. For the use and analysis of the data, methods and tools from the field of machine learning are used, which require high-performance computing power in the form of high-performance graphics processors (GPUs). For this purpose, the computer cluster consists of several CPU- or GPU-based computing nodes and storage nodes.

Computer cluster consisting of 16 CPU / Compute nodes with 2 CPU sockets each.

3 network switches with a total of 162 ports are installed for the network connection both in the frontend and backend.

A storage cluster based on Ceph is required to set up an IaaS cloud infrastructure.

High-performance graphics processors are required for the area of machine learning. 2 GPU-based compute nodes required.