NeIC Conference 2013: Report on "Workshop: Center Operations best practices"

"Building and maintaining services for Sensitive Data" (Gard Thomassen)

• There is a demand for services for sensitive data (video, MR imaging, DNA sequencing).
• To meet this demand, Services For Sensitive Data (TSD) project started at 2008.
• System is based on hosting virtual servers behind a two factor authentication gateway with separated VLANS.
• To feed data into the system, there is a separate system with local storage. Data put into that system rsynced to the user's project directory.

Questions / Answers

• Encrypting each users file trees and passing one time keys each time is tried but found out that it is too slow.
• Broken or replaced disks are processed afterwards for erasing sensitive data.

"From Old-School to New-School Operation of HPC" (Anil Thapa)

• Three year pilot project for joint Nordic HPC system.
• 1M Euro budget.
• There is one system administrator for each country.
• Procurement group has a member from each country.
• System Admin Group (SAG) provides first line support.
• SAG made the procurement.
• Collaboration was easy, but budget process are very formal, and procurement took very long time.

Users

• Iceland has 11 project groups with 30 users
• Denmark has 10 project groups with 26 users
• Sweden has 8 project groups with 33 users
• Norway has 8 project groups with 32 users

Applications / Research Areas

• Quantum Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Physics
• Biochemistry

Hardware

• Hosted at Thor DC
• HP Blade system with 288 BL280cG6.
• Intel Xeon E5649 24GB Ram 250 GB Disk per node
• 35 TFlops
• Infiniband QDR
• Storage HP iBrix

Results for 2012

• 15K compute hours used.
• %67 utilisation

Questions / Answers

• Selection of the hardware is questioned by Denmark.
  • There is no scratch space
  • Memory per node is not enough for their most of the jobs.

• Selection of the blades.
  • Even blades are not specified in the tenure, HP came up with the best price with a blade system.

"The energy cost of compressing sparse matrices for performance" (Jan Christian Meyer)

• This is a PRACE project.
• New Intel processors gives us ability to read actual energy use for the processor package.
• Reading energy use from processor is not a heavy task.
• Recent Linux kernels have that power readings in /proc
• Different algorithms doing the same thing can have different power usage on processor level.

Questions / Answers

• There are questions about total system power and graphics cards power usages, but here it is only the processor instrumented.

"Advanced User Support in the Swedish National HPC Infrastructure" (Torben Rasmussen)

• NSC and PDC transformed from HPC hardware support groups to eScience enablers starting from 2010.
• SNIC funded financing of application experts and advanced national support group.
• Supported research areas
  • Computational material science
  • Bioinformatics
  • Biomolecular simulations
  • CFD
  • Electronic structure calculations
  • Climate research (application expert joined NSC at Jan 2013)
• There is a common ticketing system at national level.
• There are application experts meetings twice a year. Guests from other countries both from HPC centers and private sector invited to exchange experiences.
• There will be a meeting at October 2-3 2013 at HPC2N. Waiting guests from Nordic countries.
• Critical mass of staff not reached yet. It is difficult to start new projects with current numbers of staff.
• There is a problem with application expert career path.

Questions / Answers

• Are AE's participate in projects?
  • Current financing is strictly for enabling activities.
• Is SNIC thinking about charging projects for advanced support?
  • It should be difficult, this is a research enabling activity prioritized by research council.

Session Summary

• There is a demand for services for storage and computation on sensitive data in the Nordics (video, MR imaging, DNA sequencing).
• Increasing demand from outside universities, e.g. in primary care.
• NHPC met target by doing joint procurement and going into production.

Lessons Learned

• USIT has a production system for handling sensitive data, serving Norway.
• NHPC System Admin Group (SAG) provides first line support.

Future Directions

• The competence and funding to implement a scalable, distributed and federated system exists across the Nordics. A scaling prototype could be feasible within a year.
• NHPC will be evaluated in terms of assessing possible project continuation.
• A network for Advanced user support is in envisioned, with a startup meeting October 2-3 2013 at HPC2N. Guests from Nordic countries are warmly welcome.