Research Computing Panel
CSG Seattle '02
Research Computing Support
at
Penn State
Penn State
●
82K students
●
4K faculty, 10K staff
●
24 locations
●
PA's land grant
Research at Penn State
●
20+ Colleges, Consortia, etc.
●
$500M research annually (out of $2.4B total)
●
–
Navy, HHS, NSF, NASA etc. make up about half
–
Industry, state, etc. make up the rest
Near term areas of emphasis/strength
–
Life sciences
–
Children, Youth and Families Consortium
–
Materials
Goal
●
Fill in gaps in research enterprise to:
–
Make research easier to do
–
Make research less expensive to do
–
Reduce time to discovery
–
Take risks where faculty can't or won't
–
Lead by example quickly or get out of the way even
more quickly
Background
●
●
As with everything else on campus - research,
research computing, and research computing
support is a highly distributed venture with an
amazingly mobile and changing set of spheres of
influence
Fine-grained (PI level) and profound
independence
Research Computing Support at PSU
●
Software
●
Hardware
●
Consulting
Software
●
●
●
Site license mgt for appropriate software
–
Roots in site licensing for various unix Oses
–
Includes titles such as SAS, SPSS, Labview,
NASTRAN, FIDAP, IDEAS, GAUSSIAN,
Mathematica, Matlab, NAG, IMSL, etc.
We'll seed new acquisitions and help market their
usefulness
Software on our on resources that might fall out
of this
Software
●
●
Bioinformatics portal - collection of genomics
tools in one place
ETD support
Hardware
●
IBM SP - seeing limited use at this point
●
Large memory cluster- AIX based
●
Intel clusters
–
Lion-X (32x2 500MHz PIII)
●
–
Lion-XE (112x2 1GHz PIII)
●
–
Myrinet, GigE, 100Mb
Dolphin, 100Mb
Lion-XL (80+x2 2.4 Ghz PIII)
●
Quadrics,100Mb + Bluearc
Hardware (?)
●
OpenPBS
–
Maui scheduler consortium member
●
Compilers du jour, numerical libraries
●
All hardware acquired via consortium building
–
We make a technology decision considering many
factors, and get others to buy in. In return, they share
unused cycles. $ come from lots places: NSF MRI,
SCREMS, IGERT, etc.
–
Also run a co-location center
Hardware (?)
●
●
Visualization
–
Immersadesk
–
Immersive Environments Lab
–
Plotting
Outside of central IT
–
Clusters
●
●
●
10-15 small to large clusters out there (16 to 100 nodes)
We'll help where we can and share all we know
Many instances of less than efficient operation and
performance
Hardware (?)
●
Outside of central IT
–
Clusters
●
●
●
–
10-20 small to large clusters out there (16 to 100 nodes)
We'll help where we can and share all we know
Many instances of less than efficient operation and
performance
Visualization
●
3 RAVEs
●
C3 (CAVE) in Applied Research Lab
Hardware
●
Partnerships
–
Level 2 iVDGL site
–
Tobacco $
–
Meteorology, Math, Stat, Astrophysics, etc.
Consulting
●
●
●
●
Distributed workstation sys admin - cost
recovered
We'll help you build a cluster but will encourage
you to see the benefits in partnering with us
We'll help you port codes to a dist. Mem. Par.
computing model
Statistical consulting done elsewhere - Stat,
Social Science Research Institute, Meth. Ctr.
Grid
●
●
●
Hype:reality ratio is heading back towards one
instead of infinity which is a good thing
We'll try to put a man on on Mars too but if we
wind up only getting to the Moon, that'll be OK
and still very cool and useful.
As already mentioned, iVDGL