HPCx
Power for the Grid
Dr Alan D Simpson
HPCx Project Director
EPCC Technical Director
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
HPCx
September 2003
2
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
HPCx
September 2003
3
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
HPCx
September 2003
4
Virtual Organisation
• Dual-centre functional support teams
Outreach
Life sciences
New applications
Applications Support
Users
Helpdesk
Training
Liaising with users
Terascaling
Capability applications
Scalable algorithms
Performance optimisation
Software Engineering
Underpinning technology
Grid/e-Science
Systems & Networking
Flexible and responsive capability computing service
Smooth transitions between phases
HPCx
September 2003
Technology
5
HPCx Utilisation
800000
>1024 CPUs
700000
1024 CPUs
Usage
600000
512 CPUs
500000
256 CPUs
400000
128 CPUs
300000
64 CPUs
32 CPUs
200000
16 CPUs
100000
8 CPUs
0
Jan-03
Feb-03
Mar-03
Apr-03
May-03
Jun-03
Jul-03
Aug-03
• successful first 9 months
• >75% utilisation for last 6 months
• capability usage has increased to 35%
HPCx
September 2003
6
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
HPCx
September 2003
7
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
HPCx
September 2003
8
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
HPCx
September 2003
9