What's Your HPC Game Plan?

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What's Your HPC Game Plan?

5/1/2008

By Charlene O’Hanlon

CT: Do you find that faculty members resist committing their funds to a centralized HPC resource; that they don't want to give up their siloed projects?

Neeman: I think most institutions have one or more faculty members saying, "It's my money, I'm going to spend it on what I want, and I don't want anything to do with the centralized resource." The question is the extent to which that goes on. At OU, there are fewer than a half-dozen third-party clusters on campus, all quite small. And in practice, it would be very laborintensive to port each of those fourhundred- some users to the centralized resource. There's a G5 cluster on campus, a Power5 resource, and some AMD resources, altogether running two hundred different codes. We'd have to migrate folks from resource to resource by hand. Typically, the people using those smaller resources aren't paying for a commercial scheduler like LSF, which, in principle, allows two disparate machines to operate together the way condo pools do. It's not that migrating those users can't be done in theory; it's just fairly impractical.

Bottum: A lot of this is sociological. Researchers must have confidence both in the centralized resource and in the operation and administration. I've heard from researchers, "We don't know if we can entrust our research to you." That "you" could be anybody: an administration; a central computing operation; or a national center, NSF or otherwise. What researchers need is confidence that the central investment in HPC and the quality of service operations are going to be there.

Jennings: At UT, we've got a department willing to put some trust in our new HPC resources, so we're trying to use that to springboard into a much more widespread offering for the rest of the campus. It boils down to making sure that you're doing things right, so that the word gets out and researchers realize, "Hey, we can trust these guys to do a good job providing a fair share of resources to everybody." So far, we've been reasonably successful, and I'm looking forward to getting some other departments on board.

Bottum: There can be many, many incentives for researchers to embrace centralized HPC resources: security, 24- hour operations, and support, not to mention getting a better deal on hardware. Last January, one of our faculty members bought an HPC system for his own research, and whichever way you measure it, he got a much better deal when later on he bought into the condo cluster. That's the carrot, but then some institutions also end up using the stick: Last summer, the CFO at one university struggling with financial issues shut off the air conditioning in a bunch of campus buildings. That flushed a lot of siloed projects out of the woodwork: All of a sudden you had individual supercomputers and servers overheating- machines the administration didn't know about beforehand. If the researchers involved had utilized the off-campus data center, their projects would not have been affected.