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High-Performance Computing
High-Performance Happy
4/1/2007
Another goal: Bottum wants to connect Clemson to the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid, a research supercomputing project that boasts more than 102 teraflops of computing capability, and more than 15 petabytes of online and archival data storage distributed among nine partner sites.
Centralization: Aggressive or Organic?
Clearly, Clemson is being aggressive in its pursuit of research, while other universities have taken a somewhat more organic approach. Texas Tech University, for example, has had a central HPC environment of sorts since the late 1990s, set up specifically to facilitate a major visualization project. Once funding ran out in 2001, however, the university began to look at ways to set up the resources for use by the entire campus community.
“When we first took it over, we had to look closely at the HPC program and analyze who was using it,” says Sam Segran, Texas Tech CIO. “We took a business approach and discovered not only who was using it, but who wasn’t—and if not, then why. What we discovered was that most colleges were not really using the system for visualization [the original intended use]; on the computing side, researchers don’t have the skill set to do visualization,” he says. “But the high computing—the pure data-crunching, multi-teraflop computing—that’s where we found a lot of interest. Researchers wanted to do a lot of that type of computing in a short amount of time.”
Based on that knowledge, the university set up a grid computing network for such high computing, purchased a Dell cluster, and is in the process of tripling its capacity to close to 5 teraflops. In addition, Texas Tech developed a community cluster, which five researchers have bought into. The concept behind the community cluster: The IT department manages the researchers’ systems and the institution matches the researchers’ investment, dollar for dollar. Researchers are guaranteed a certain number of nodes and they can use unused nodes whenever they need to, greatly improving their output abilities, says Segran.
Presence of Research Unit in Central IT, by Institutional Mission
At Louisiana State, HPC efforts are comanaged by Voss’ department and by Ed Seidel, director of the university’s Center for Computation and Technology—a department that was created in 2001 as part of the Louisiana Governor’s Information Technology Initiative to advance the use of information technology in higher education and scientific research. The center has more than 26 teraflops running on eight different machines from Dell, IBM, and Atipa Technologies. Voss maintains that co-management makes sense from both planning and operations perspectives. “Seidel is Captain Kirk, and I am Mr. Scott,” he quips.
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