HPC and Cloud Technologies in
Greece and South Eastern Europe
Tryfon Chiotis
GRNET
GRNET
• state-owned company (SA) under GSRT
established in 1998
• provide advanced e-infrastructures/services
to the Greek academic and research
institutions:
– National and international connectivity
– Infrastructures/services (network, computing,
storage) to the community
• promotion and dissemination of ICT in the
public and private sector
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GRNET numbers:
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> 100 universities, research centers, academic organizations
> 15.000 schools
> 1.000.000 users
Dark fiber backbone (Nx10 Gbps)
access 1 || 10 Gbps per institution
International connectivity through GEANT network 3*10 Gbps
Neutral point for the Greek Internet Exchange (GRIX) node –
peering all Greek ISPs at 10Gbps each
• GRID services
• Storage Services
– (e.g. Online Storage-Pithos, 50 or 100 GB/user–6500 users per day)
• VPS VM provisioning (>400 VMs) & Public Cloud (~okeanos)
• 2 DataCenters (NRC & Ministry of Education premises)
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• 35 PoPs
– 8410km fibers (IRU)
• MANs Attiki &
Thessaloniki
• DF loops 33 cities
• Single-mode fiber pair
• 15-years IRUs
• Availability >> 99%
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Cloud Services
• Virtual Private Servers (VPS)
– Persistent volumes/longevity/non volatile VMs (RACKSPACE
style)
• Public Cloud Service ~okeanos (VM, volumes)
– Short lived/volatile instances (high churn rate)
Amazon (AWS) style
• Online File Storage Service (Amazon S3 like)
– Files, groups, REST API
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Public Cloud Service ~okeanos
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Deliver IaaS to GRNET’s customers
• direct: IT depts of connected institutions
• indirect: university students, researchers in academia
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Other IaaS efforts (Amazon, Rackspace, Nimbula,
Nebula, GoGrid etc)
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Amazon EC2 not an end-user service
Need to develop custom UI, AAI layers
Vendor lock-in
Unsuitable for IT depts
persistent, long-term servers, custom networking requirements
• Nimbula Director offers similar functionality
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GRNET and HPC
- Invited by the Ministry of Development to submit
a proposal which will support Greece’s
participation in PRACE.
- Goal is the development of a national HPC
infrastructure that will join PRACE’s Tier-1
European infrastructure.
- Budget 3.5 MEuro
- Procurement and installation of HPC infrastructure
- Operation and provision of support services
Technical specs and target
applications
- Aiming for at least a ~150 Tflops supercomputing system
- Petabyte level storage
- Hosting in GRNET’s existing Datacenter
- Support for a wide range of scientific disciplines:
Biomedicince, Bioinformatics, Computational Engineering,
Physics, Metoerology, Climatology, Seismology, Computational
Chemistry etc.
- Based on the results of the HellasHPC feasibility study
- National survey among 29 academic and research institutes
(summer 2010)
- Collected requirements from 200 scientific applications
developed by 162 research teams from various scientific
domains
High-Performance & Supercomputing:
HP-SEE
• 33 months 3,88 m€ project, 540MMs
• 120 Tflops aggregate
• 2 BlueGene machines
• Larger procurements coming up
• Close links to PRACE
• Possibility of a joint Tier-1 centre
• Balance of national and EC funds
• Towards long-term sustainable
European hierarchical model
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Key results: HPC Initiatives
• Support the setup of national HPC task forces or their incorporation in
existing structures
– National HPC initiatives guidelines provided
– Governance, organizational, operational, training and dissemination details
provided
– D2.2: “National HPC task-force modeling and organizational guidelines”
• Recommendations for HPC centers procurement provided
– Legal, procedural, technical and planning
– D2.1: “Procurement guidelines analysis”
• Regional collaboration models in definition: Draft resource sharing
MoU in place
• Liaison with PRACE, other pan-European activities, and world-wide
initiatives
HP-SEE: Project Objectives
• Objective 1 – Empowering multi-disciplinary virtual research
communities
• Objective 2 – Deploying integrated infrastructure for virtual
research communities
– Including a GEANT link to Southern Caucasus
• Objective 3 – Policy development and stimulating regional
inclusion in pan-European HPC trends
• Objective 4 – Strengthening the regional and national human
network
Crucial for regional cooperation: policy
development and political support
• Project: South-East European Area for
eInfrastructures
• Area: "INFRA-2008-3.1: ERA-NET supporting
cooperation for research infrastructures in all S&T
fields“
• Start: 1 April 2009
• Duration: 36 months
• Project type: Coordination and support action
• Partnership: Ministry partners + eInfra partners
programme manager partners
• Core Objective: Develop and strengthen the
coordination and cooperation of national
eInfrastructures programmes in the region of SouthEast Europe.
SEERA-EI: policy level collaboration
• Establishing a communication platform for programme owners, at
www.seera-ei.eu
• Analysis of past and current eInfrastructure programmes and funding
modalities
• Joint training events; bilateral visits
• Best Practices identification
• National programme cookbook
Common vision & strategy
• Studies for joint operations centers, network (SEELight), HPC (regional
ops centers)
• Joint pilot call between Ministries in cloud computing
• Join regional strategy and vision MoU
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See more on:
http://okeanos.grnet.gr