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High-Performance Computing
High-Performance Happy
4/1/2007
How many full-time equivalent (FTE) staff within central IT are currently assigned to the support of research?
Indeed, the oversight aspect of the issue is not a small one. “The most important element left out of most IT plans is the human element,” acknowledges Brian Voss, Louisiana State University CIO. “If we don’t have people to help us use the technology, we don’t get the most bang for the buck and it’s pretty much useless.”
Putting Power Behind the Research
Still, university IT directors don’t capriciously undertake centralizing management of the institutional cyberinfrastructure. Rather, most such initiatives are mandated by the CIO, with the aim of building out a hefty HPC environment that will enable the university to take a leading role in research, or at least approach such a position. An institution’s ability to attract and empower a CIO with experience in this direction can be key.
Jim Bottum, vice provost for computing & IT and CIO at Clemson University (SC), was brought on six months ago specifically to lead the charge to build such an HPC environment. Formerly CIO and VP for computing at Purdue (IN), Bottum also served as executive director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. “I was hired by Clemson to come and build a highperformance computing environment because I’ve been in the business for a while,” he admits, a bit coyly.
In his six months on the job, Bottum has orchestrated Clemson’s membership in the Open Science Grid, a consortium of universities, national laboratories, scientific collaborations, and software developers that utilizes 1,000 desktops in student labs for certain applications. He also has directed the College of Engineering and Science to move its clusters to the university’s center, and he has been busy buying the big iron for the center. In addition, says Bottum, as part of the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR), Clemson will host CU-ICAR’s 10-teraflop system along with automaker BMW.
Bottum reports that Clemson will boast more than 20,000 square feet of centralized high-performance computing space when the center is completely outfitted. “And we have tremendous expansion capabilities,” he adds, disclosing that by summer 2007 the center will house in excess of 12 to 15 teraflops. “We are putting significant money into this project and that will include rearchitecting the campus network. My charge was to build an aggressive infrastructure and get involved in national initiatives, and I feel like we are making some progress,” he says.
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