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High-Performance Computing
High-Performance Happy
4/1/2007
But the truth is that while the importance of research at LSU was always wellrecognized and understood, it remained a separate entity from the administration until Voss came on board in 2005. “I understood the role that HPC plays [in research as a whole], and so I started taking over the operational structure,” he says. “I believe in the importance of all elements of an IT environment.” What’s more, he says, “The value of research beyond advancing science is underrated: Research is a feeder line for teaching.”
At Princeton University (NJ), the desire to enhance the institution’s research reputation, coupled with the foresight to understand where technology in general was headed, prompted the school to rethink its earlier strategy.
“When I came on board in 2001, there was little central support of IT services,” recalls Betty Leydon, CIO and VP for information technology. “So we started canvassing the faculty and asking what they needed. We quickly realized the then-current model of individual research clusters was inefficient.” After gaining research faculty acceptance of a progressive, central IT management model (and pooling her department’s financial resources with those of individual faculty members and, later, faculty groups and individual colleges), in 2005 Princeton was able to purchase an IBM Blue Gene computer.
“When we started asking faculty members to contribute their research money toward purchasing this system, it was obvious we were doing something right because they said ‘Yes!’ and we got all the money we needed to buy Blue Gene,” Leydon recounts. “After we received the machine, everything grew outward from there. Now, researchers are advancing their work more quickly because by pooling their resources, everyone has gotten more resources than they would have been able to get otherwise, on their own.” Princeton has since been able to fund an additional two Dell clusters for research, using the same funding method, Leydon reports. The university’s HPC power is now up to 15.5 teraflops. “Once you get a model that works,” she advises, “it grows by itself. We’ve also been able to purchase centrally shared storage the same way. Faculty members used their research dollars to purchase this because those who are using it see the value.”
It’s All About the Resources
Increased HPC capacity is but one advantage researchers have realized from central management. They have also discovered that the more mundane tasks of providing proper cooling, power, security, and IT support are no longer their problem, leaving them with more resources to devote to pure research.
Researchers at the University of Oklahoma are taking advantage of the central HPC resources there (currently at 7.7 teraflops across two clusters, and scheduled to increase to 12.2 teraflops later this year), because “it is difficult to justify purchasing hardware when researchers know it’s already available at the center and they can use the money to hire another grad student instead,” OSCER Director Neeman says.
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