What's Your HPC Game Plan?

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Supercomputing

What's Your HPC Game Plan?

5/1/2008

By Charlene O’Hanlon

Bottum: Clemson has invested in supercomputing as part of its academic plan, and there is a central contribution of funding dollars. For about a year, we have had a few co-location-type supercomputers at the data center. And three or four weeks ago, we put our first partnership computer on the floor and opened it up to friendly users. We call it the condo cluster. Eight or nine faculty have bought into it, contributing monies just toward the hardware, not for all the stuff that's behind it such as the network fabric and the storage, which is funded by the university. It's about a 60/40 funding scenario; 60 percent is what came in through faculty grants and startup packages, and 40 percent represents the central investment.

CT: Do any of the colleges and departments within your institutions pursue their own HPC grants for individual projects, and then build out environments that are essentially silos, so that the rest of the university can't take advantage of all supercomputing resources? If so, is that a problem?

Neeman: That certainly does occur here at OU. I don't know that I would characterize it as a problem, though, because the HPC resources that an individual faculty member can put together are substantially less than the resources we can provide centrally. We would rather faculty participate in condominium computing and, if they do, we pay for everything except the nodes; they buy the nodes and we install them and deploy them within our cluster infrastructure. Of course, they have to purchase hardware that's compatible with what we have.

Currently, though, faculty are more accustomed to having their own systems, and while some are participating in condo computing, it's still probably less than 5 percent. When faculty members choose to go off on their own, then they're on their own. We are not in a position to provide the labor to maintain third-party systems. We also don't have space in the machine room for those systems, so that becomes the faculty's problem.

CT: When you are putting together your annual IT budget, are you looking at it from the point of view that supercomputing is a shared resource and you're going to support it financially, but the departments and colleges have the option of utilizing HPC resources or not?