High-Performance Happy

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > High-Performance Happy

High-Performance Computing

High-Performance Happy

4/1/2007

By Charlene O’Hanlon

"IT management of HPC takes more than just an effort to educate the researchers; there has to be buy-in on both sides." — Sam Segran, Texas Tech

And at Indiana University, “The notion of central management sprang from the researchers not having the ability, time, or expertise to run a large cluster in their own manner,” points out David Hancock, highperformance computing and research manager. “They were instead depending on other staff or graduate students to do the management, and there was such a high turnover rate that it wasn’t efficient. So we convinced them it was in their own interest to turn over management.” In addition to IT support and management—as well as the infrastructure necessary to run the systems—IU offers what Hancock refers to as “streamlined operations.”

“Researchers contribute the [grant] funds, and we make the purchases on their behalf,” he explains. “What we try to sell is centralized management and the provision of access to dedicated time if needed,” he adds. “Most of the researchers have signed on, and in some cases, some of them are willing to offer opportunistic use to other researchers.” It’s not a difficult sell to most researchers, Hancock maintains: Indiana has more than 20 teraflops on its Big Red cluster alone. And, “Each new cluster we get enables researchers to extend and take their research further than they could before,” he emphasizes.

For its part, Clemson is selling the idea of central management as one less headache for the researcher, Bottum says. “Users receive the benefits of 24/7 service, professional systems administration, security, backup—things they would expect in a data center—so the faculty and students can focus on doing research.”

Indeed, support for systems has been a major factor in getting researchers to sign on with central management. Explains Neeman, “In technology, you have two choices: ‘established,’ also known as obsolete; and ‘emerging,’ also known as broken. HPC is a ‘broken’ technology business, so you need to have full-time technology professionals to keep it going. At Oklahoma, we have professionals whose sole job it is to keep HPC resources working.”

That seems to be a trend among many universities. According to the ECAR report, 43 percent of responding institutions that consider themselves researchintensive have a research IT unit, and 47 percent of responding institutions that consider themselves balanced between academics and research have a research IT unit. Still, in some cases, the idea of central management has not been an easy sell.

“Researchers sometimes think that if high-performance computing is managed by IT, the money for it will end up being cannibalized for use by the administration, not for the HPC buildout,” LSU’s Voss explains.