What's Your HPC Game Plan?

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What's Your HPC Game Plan?

5/1/2008

By Charlene O’Hanlon

In our high-performance computing roundtable, IT pros frankly discuss funding, centralization, silo cluster migration, and other pressing campus HPC issues. Fine-tune your supercomputing strategy here!

The University of Tennessee's Ragghianti (left), Jennings (right), and high-performance computing cluster

A university's supercomputing infrastructure certainly can put it on the map in the research and development arena. Yet developing a cutting-edge high-performance computing facility requires an intricate mix of grants, faculty startup dollars, external funding contracts, IT budget allocation-and internal marketing. Campus Technology recently conducted a "virtual roundtable" discussion with four IT leaders, each grappling with HPC challenges: Henry Neeman, director, OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (OSCER), University of Oklahoma; Jim Bottum, vice provost and CIO for computing and information technology, Clemson University (SC); Gerald Ragghianti, IT administrator for high-performance computing, The University of Tennessee- Knoxville; and Larry Jennings, IT manager, also from The University of Tennessee. Their challenges may be yours, too.

Campus Technology: Let's get a quick overview of how supercomputing efforts at each of your institutions are progressing, and how these initiatives affect you and your departments.

Henry Neeman: As director of the OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research, a large part of my job is taken up by supercomputing. I also teach a course for the Computer Science department most semesters, but 90 percent of my work time is spent on supercomputing. Our department is a division of OUIT-University of Oklahoma Information Technology. We're a fairly small staff: There are four of us, three of whom are operations folks, so it's up to me to handle things like fundraising and whatnot. The overwhelming majority of our funding comes from OU's core IT budget.

Jim Bottum: I'm the CIO responsible for all of the traditional activities you would expect from that position, but Clemson has made highperformance computing a priority, as part of its academic roadmap. So, supercomputing is a significant emphasis area within my job.

Gerald Ragghianti: At The University of Tennessee, our centralized HPC effort is relatively new; it started about one-and-a-half years ago. I'm actually the first full-time staff member 100 percent dedicated to our centralization cluster; for [my colleague] Larry, it's not quite that much. I perform centralized administration of the cluster, and take care of speaking with researchers to customize our clusters to their needs.