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The Story So Far

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It’s been just under a year since the project team were given the go-ahead to start work on building this service. Those of you who attended the requirements-gathering workshops last summer may recall that we intend to launch the service in late Spring/early Summer of this year.

Although the project team is based in NUIT, we have invited input and participation from researchers at every stage of the project: gathering requirements, system architecture, staff recruitment and tender evaluation.  More details will be posted in the coming week or so, but here’s a short summary of the projects progress to date.

People

After a couple of rounds of recruitment we are pleased to be welcoming a new HPC research computing analyst on board. This person will sit at the interface between the technology and the researchers whop use it, providing training, guidance and some coding support.

We are working with a recruitment agency in order to source a systems administrator to oversee the day to day management of the system itself.

The System

Summer’s requirements workshops and questionnaires, were followed up by a day-long solution architecture workshop, where a group of researchers, IT staff and some external HPC expertise evaluated and condensed the various technical requirements into a proposed solution that would serve a wide variety of potential users.

The result was a system based on the most recent generation of Intel Broadwell CPUs, connected via high-speed interconnect, in a topology that allowed for an island of nodes that would favour tightly-coupled parallel jobs. The system design also included groups of medium-, high-, and extra-high RAM nodes, featuring 0.25, .5 and 1.5 TB RAM per node. The 1.5 TB nodes feature 4 CPUs.

 

Omissions

There are several ways in which our envisaged service falls short of all of the requests for features that we received.Part way through the requiremnts-gathering phase of the project, something called Brexit weighed in. The tender did ask for indicative quotes for GPU nodes, and we have yet to make a final decision on that.  We did not tender for any Intel Xeon Phi nodes, or nodes running Microsoft Windows. We are looking into the possibility of facilitating access to Intel Xeon Phi nodes at the Hartree facility, via the N8 consortium.

 

 

About The HPC Project

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The Project Team

The business case, project management and eventual service management are being carried out by the IT Service. This work has taken place in close consultation with the university’s research communities, via the HPC Steering group, and via a series of open consultation events that took place in Summer 2016.

The Project’s Main Deliverables are: 

  • The Purchase of High Performance Computing equipment, both hardware and software
  • Appointment to two new posts (Research Computing Specialist, HPC System Administrator)
  • Establishment of a University-wide HPC service, designed to fully realise the potential benefits of the above investments

Why?

to quote the initial business case:

” High performance computing is the practice of aggregating very large numbers of computers (often many thousands) to deliver much higher performance than one could get out of a typical desktop computer or workstation.  This is done to solve large problems in science, engineering, medicine, and, increasingly in the social sciences and humanities.

The effective use of HPC systems can reduce the solution time of really big computing problems from months or years to hours or days.

HPC is often used for modelling and solving highly complex research problems, and a lot of research that would have been carried out in the past using laboratory experiments is now carried out computationally, using models run on HPC.

Moreover, the power and complexity of HPC applications and technology have given rise to the multi-disciplinary field of expertise in their use: Computational Science, establishing itself as the “third pillar” of scientific enquiry, alongside theory and experiment. “

We believe that the best way to provide and manage such a resource at the institutional level is via a centrally-delivered service, free at point-of-use to all university researchers, backed up by specialist support and training.

When?

Requirements-gathering took place during early Summer 2016, to be followed by recruitment, procurement and installation during late 2016 and early 2017.

Service launch is slated for May-July 2017