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Supercomputing
What's Your HPC Game Plan?
5/1/2008
CT: Do you know of any universities that have mandated all supercomputing must go through a central HPC resource?
Neeman: I imagine there are one or two out there, but I haven't actually heard of any. At most institutions, it would be very difficult to make that mandate stick, because faculty don't react well to having things dictated to them. A model that works pretty well is to say, "If you're going to go your own way, then you're going to do it on your own." That is, the central administration does not support or provide resources to someone who chooses to use a thirdparty system, but that individual is free to do so.
Ragghianti: It's really quite a slippery slope to try to mandate use of the centralized resource. In my experience, faculty are determined to be as flexible as possible with their research-and for a lot of people, that means they have to hold on to their own machines and be able to touch them whenever they like. A lot of these small third-party clusters actually started as desktop machines, and then sort of morphed and grew into a few racks in a makeshift machine room.
CT: Do you have any final tips for institutions looking to get centralized HPC initiatives funded and off the ground?
Neeman: An administrator may be the right person to make a decision about how to spend HPC funding, but the advocacy to drive the search for the money in the first place has to come from the people who are going to use the supercomputing resources and, in practice, that means the faculty and their deans. If you have a great many faculty coming together to say that having a centralized supercomputing resource is crucial to their success, that substantially raises the probability of getting more dollars for the central HPC initiative-particularly if among that group of supporters, there are a few heroes known to the administration as big money-getters. Frankly, if you don't have the faculty advocating for it, it's not going to happen.
Ragghianti: In my eyes, the big benefit of our efforts here at UT has been that when researchers prepare their grant proposals, they are able to point to a tested and well-used centralized system, and this lends an air of legitimacy and lets the granting organization know that the funds will be used efficiently.
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