What's Your HPC Game Plan?

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What's Your HPC Game Plan?

5/1/2008

By Charlene O’Hanlon

Neeman: We don't force anybody to participate, but it's no trivial matter for faculty to find all the space, power, and cooling that they need for HPC systems. Perhaps more importantly, it's no small matter for them to take the place of the labor qualified to do the work. If faculty have a mechanism for doing all that- and there are indeed some small third-party clusters on campus-we don't prevent them from using their own systems, and there's no hard feelings involved. In fact, some of the people who have their own third-party clusters are also active users on our system; but we don't help them with their own clusters because we don't have the resources to do so.

Jennings: Much of what Henry is saying applies to us at UT. We are beginning to see researchers wanting to get away from handling their own clusters- it takes time away from their research. Now, departments want to buy in to the cluster that we're maintaining centrally. It helps them out, and it also allows us to provide more resources for the rest of the academic computing on campus. I think this movement away from silo clusters is something that's going to catch on here: Our Engineering department has been a strong proponent of this for the past couple of years, and I believe that we will see acceptance across the departments as we demonstrate that the centralized model works.

"I've heard from researchers, ‘We don't know if we can entrust our research to you.' What they need is confidence that the central investment in HPC and the quality of service operations are going to be there." -Jim Bottum, Clemson University

CT: If faculty researchers are "buying in to" the nodes in the condo clusters, are they actually using grant money to do so?

Neeman: I see grant money, but more often the money researchers use to buy in to the condo cluster comes from startup funds provided to a new faculty member by the university. So, for example, when a department is hiring a new faculty member, it will negotiate a dollar amount-$15,000, $50,000, $500,000-of startup funds a candidate will receive for research when he or she starts at the university. Some new hires choose to spend some of that money on HPC hardware.

Jennings: For the most part, that's the way it is here at UT, as well. And when our faculty members are writing grant proposals, we try to encourage them to consider computing resources as part of the grant. But that doesn't necessarily mean the resources will get funded. Sometimes, the grant providers think that's just part of the overall infrastructure that should already be in place at the university. Then, of course, it's tougher to get the funding for those resources.