What's Your HPC Game Plan?

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What's Your HPC Game Plan?

5/1/2008

By Charlene O’Hanlon

CT: How does your institution find the majority of its funding for supercomputing?

Neeman: Prior to fall of 2001, before OSCER was founded, we had purchased several large HPC machines over a 15- to 20-year period. But each was funded individually, with one-shot external funding for purchase, and cobbledtogether people time for maintenance. There was no mechanism for ongoing support-funds or staffing-for highperformance systems. Nor was there any mechanism for training faculty and staff to use such high-end resources. OSCER changed all that.

The founding of our supercomputing center also coincided very closely with the hiring of our first CIO, Dennis Aebersold. Dennis had a keen interest in pursuing a research computing component within IT, and his engagement and vision were crucial to the success of OSCER. Other key factors: our VP for Research T.H. Lee Williams' interest in providing support for computingintensive research, along with strong interest on the part of the faculty and staff who wanted access to HPC resources. And finally, my own interest in teaching HPC helped make those resources more straightforward to use, than would normally be the case.

"We are beginning to see departments wanting to buy in to the cluster that we're maintaining centrally. That helps faculty focus more on their own research, and it also allows us to provide more HPC resources for the rest of the academic computing on campus." -Larry Jennings, The University of Tennessee-Knoxville

When we first got started, some of the funding for OSCER came out of a contract with a private company involved in a weather project; weather forecasting involves a tremendous amount of supercomputing. A little bit of the funding-something on the order of 10 to 15 percent-came out of the research VP's office. The bulk of the funding came out of the core IT budget; the CIO's budget.

Now, the overwhelming majority of our funding is simply core IT budget. We look at research computing in general, and HPC in particular, as a driver for increasing the overall external funding base of the university. For example, because of the budget dollars invested in OSCER, we've seen external funding come in at a ratio of about 5 to 1. That is, for every dollar spent on OSCER, about five dollars comes in from external funding agencies for projects that make use of OSCER-organizations such as the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, NASA, National Institutes of Health, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, state agencies, and private companies.

Less than 10 percent of our funding comes from grants. In late 2003, for instance, we received a modest-sized major research instrumentation grant, on the order of $500,000, of which about $300,000 went to buying a small Itanium cluster. That's the last time we got a grant to pay for equipment. Currently, I have an NSF Cyberinfrastructure TEAM [Training, Education, Advancement, and Mentoring] grant, which focuses on finding better ways to teach supercomputing, rather than on funding infrastructure. In fact, OU is highly committed to teaching highperformance computing, as well as providing HPC resources.