IACS Hires Senior HPC Engineer to Help Run SBU Computing Clusters

New recruit Eric Rosenberg describes IACS’ future plans

By Taylor Ha

Eric Rosenberg Senior HPC Engineer

Growing up on Long Island, 39-year-old Eric Rosenberg was constantly fiddling with objects like Legos and toy trains, questioning the mechanics behind their function. “I was always taking things apart and always wanted to see how things worked,” Rosenberg recalled. Today, he’s still tinkering around with objects, but now he’s doing so as a senior HPC engineer in the Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS) at SBU. 

“I thought that this might be an interesting transition for me - to move into high performance computing vs. administrative computing,” said Rosenberg, who joined the IACS team in mid-July. “It’s cutting-edge.”

He helps manage on-campus computing clusters, or collections of individual computers that all work as one, especially two relatively new clusters: SeaWulf and LIred. LIred has been fully operational since fall of 2015. SeaWulf, however, is a new cluster that came online a few months ago. In addition to the traditional HPC configuration, SeaWulf also contains an OpenStack component, which means Stony Brook professors will be able to dynamically allocate computational resources: “Let’s say a professor wants 32 virtual machines with 64 gigabytes of memory, running a specific software stack. They’ll be able to go to a self-service portal and with a few clicks of the mouse, build a virtual environment” Rosenberg explained.

The SeaWulf system was purchased as a result of a Major Research Instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation and is a 4,592 core cluster consisting of 164 compute nodes with a peak performance of ~240 Teraflops. Each node is equipped with 128 gigabytes of memory and interconnected via a 40 Gbps network link. 8 of the compute nodes are GPU nodes, with 32 Nvidia K80 GPUs. The 40 Gbps interconnects also attach the nodes to a Petabyte shared storage array running the GPFS file system.

Rosenberg grew up in Huntington and earned a Bachelor’s of Technology with a concentration in Networking and Telecommunications from Briarcliffe College. After working in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for 2 years, he came to Stony Brook University in 2007. Since then, he’s worked in the Client Support department, where he ran the walk-in center for students with software problems; and the Systems Support department, where he managed the campus Active Directory, VMware environment, storage area networks, file and printer sharing and various other systems.

Rosenberg is married and has two young children - 2-year-old Abigail and 8-month-old Jacob: “Lately, my free time has been spent with the kids, going to the zoo, aquarium, taking them to the park.” When Rosenberg isn’t busy with his children, he might be experimenting with a new recipe as he considers himself a foodie, but more often than not he can be found tinkering with computers - his passion.

“I want to be a small part in helping researchers with their science. We set up the equipment and we help people use it,” Rosenberg said. “And it’s a good feeling when someone has used the equipment that I personally set up and got good science out of it.”

For more information about or to obtain an account on the computing resources described here, visit https://it.stonybrook.edu/services/high-performance-computing. Any SBU faculty or BNL staff member can request access.