The Academic Virtual Hosting Environment (AVHE) provides a private computing cloud to the Syracuse University research community, lowering the bar of entry for small to medium sized research efforts. The AVHE platform provides two Petabytes of storage, 1000 cores, and 25TB of memory for research use.
The AVHE is utilized for computational work or data storage from every college of school on campus and is an integral part of the University’s research computing environment.
It is very flexible and services many types of workloads including statistical analysis, 3D rendering and visualization and supports researchers with single nodes to small clusters.
The AVHE uses virtualization to provide flexibility and hardware sharing to allow multiple researchers to operate on an underlying server and storage infrastructure. This lower bar of entry and flexibility provides an environment that supports both traditional and non-traditional computational research. The AVHE supports Windows and Linux operating systems with a dynamic resource allocation model for easy scaling and configuration. Beyond supporting individual workloads, another use case for the AVHE is building small to medium sized virtualized research computing clusters, reducing the need for researchers to build and maintain small physical clusters.
The AVHE utilizes the abilities of virtualization to provide high availability, which automatically migrates workload to alternate resources in the case of physical server failure. Backup services within the AVHE are a standard service provided to researchers.