HPCxPower for the Grid

Dr Alan D SimpsonHPCx Project Director

EPCC Technical Director

2September 2003HPCx

HPCx Overview

• UK’s major HPC facility, primarily funded by EPSRC• £53M/6 year contact awarded to UoE HPCX Ltd

– wholly-owned subsidiary of University of Edinburgh– work subcontracted to CCLRC (DL), EPCC and IBM

• Largest academic supercomputer in Europe– doubling in performance every 2 years

3September 2003HPCx

HPCx Objectives

• Deliver capability computing for world-leading science

• Capability Computing– jobs which use a significant fraction of the

resource, eg, at least 512 CPUs

• Collaboration between HPCx and users through the Terascaling process

• Maximise benefits to the UK’s computational science and engineering community

• Forging links between HPC and e-Science• High quality support is the key to success

4September 2003HPCx

Partnership

• EPCC and CCLRC– are partners in C3ES (Consortium for Capability

Computing and e-Science)– underpinned by MoU between UoE and CCLRC– combines Europe’s foremost academic HPC,

e-Science and technology transfer centres– virtual organisation facilitated by Access Grid– significant experience of:

• operating national HPC services• developing capability applications

– the strongest UK partnership ever to support scientific computing

5September 2003HPCx

Virtual Organisation

OutreachLife sciencesNew applications

Applications SupportHelpdesk

Training Liaising with users

Users

Technology

Software EngineeringUnderpinning technology Grid/e-

ScienceSystems & NetworkingFlexible and responsive capability computing

service Smooth transitions between phases

Terascaling Capability applicationsScalable algorithms Performance

optimisation

• Dual-centre functional support teams

6September 2003HPCx

HPCx Utilisation

• successful first 9 months• >75% utilisation for last 6 months• capability usage has increased to 35%

0

100000

200000

300000

400000

500000

600000

700000

800000

Jan-03 Feb-03 Mar-03 Apr-03 May-03 Jun-03 Jul-03 Aug-03

Usage

>1024 CPUs

1024 CPUs

512 CPUs

256 CPUs

128 CPUs

64 CPUs

32 CPUs

16 CPUs

8 CPUs

7September 2003HPCx

HPCx and the Grid

• Key responsibility for Software Engineering team– led by Dr Stephen Booth

• who is also responsible for EPCC’s Grid operations

• HPCx is committed to support access via Grid– currently provided through Globus 2– Globus 3 support when appropriate

• HPCx is key part of UK collaboration with Extensible Teragrid Facility project in the US– promoting UK science on the world stage

8September 2003HPCx

ETF Collaboration

• Focus is exploiting unique features of Grid + HPC systems for capability computing– `HPCy-class’ applications

• Initial experiment planned for SC2003– RealityGrid computational steering– HPCx is major compute resource

• Current challenges are:– network bandwidth– lack of direct network connections to compute

nodes• developing port-forwarding software to allow Globus IO

connections to batch jobs

9September 2003HPCx

Summary

• HPCx builds on significant complementary experience at EPCC and DL

• Very successful start– …with capability usage already up to 35%

• Committed to e-Science and the Grid– strong links with NeSC and CCLRC e-Science Centre– ETF experiment at SC2003

• HPCx is focussed on capability computing– world-class service for world-class research