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BEAR The Birmingham Environment for Academic Research

BEAR The Birmingham Environment for Academic Research. IT Services . What do researchers do?. Some or all of: Learn the tools of the trade Collaborate Data Compute Project-specific resources Interpret Disseminate And, of course, the broader context.

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BEAR The Birmingham Environment for Academic Research

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  1. BEARThe Birmingham Environment for Academic Research IT Services

  2. What do researchers do? Some or all of: • Learn the tools of the trade • Collaborate • Data • Compute • Project-specific resources • Interpret • Disseminate And, of course, the broader context

  3. What are IT Services expected to do? • Support a wide range of researchers with different expertise and requirements • Lack of Linux expertise does not mean that research projects are not worthy of centrally provided resources

  4. BEAR (Birmingham Environment for Academic Research • In American Indian mythology, the Bear is the font of all wisdom and the source of all knowledge. • 4 year recurrent University funding from 2012 following one-off Research Council funding in 2006 • Partnership with OCF, IBM, Adaptive Computing, Mechdyne, IOCOM, Nice and NVIDIA • Includes conferencing and visualisation centre • Multiple services  .....

  5. BEAR services The University expects the services to serve a wide range of users, not just the usual HPC disciplines. • BlueBEAR HPC • windows HPC service • BEARView which offers: • distributed and collaborative visualisation (NICE DCV) • collaborative conferencing (IOCOM) • high-end visualisation (IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Centre) • mySQL database service • hosting and maintaining servers for research groups • training • relationship with BEAR partners • integration with MidPlus regional centre • proposed batch render farm using Qube management system • proposed Hadoop service

  6. What do researchers do? Some or all of: • Learn the tools of the trade • Collaborate • Data • Compute • Project-specific resources • Interpret • Disseminate And, of course, the broader context

  7. Learn the tools of the trade • Getting Started on the Cluster courses is our responsibility • But should the tools be this difficult to use? • And what about: • Applications Training ????? • Where’s the border between project supervisor and IT Services? • Training in fundamentals, for example turbulence models in CFD? • Applications shouldn’t be treated as a black box (despite what the vendors may say) • Little specialist knowledge in IT services of the 58 applications and tool on the service

  8. Collaborate Based in BEARView we offer: • Low-latency video and audio feeds between multiple sites, typically international • Natural conferencing environment with multiple microphones, multiple speakers, multiple cameras, hardware echo cancellation – just sit round a table and talk • Peer-to-peer shared visualisation; all parties interact and manipulate a common image without sharing raw data • Purely IP based; just requires a standard internet connection and free client software

  9. Data • Lots of it • ‘Standard’ SQL-type service • Hadoop?

  10. Compute - BlueBEAR • 60 standard nodes, each with 16 cores and 32 GB RAM – 960 cores • 2 SMP nodes, each with16 cores and 256 GB RAM • 3 GPU-accelerated nodes each with a Tesla K20 GPGPU • 150 TB filestore • Standard 2-day walltime jobs and the possibility of 10 day walltime SMP nodes, GPGPU nodes and long queue are considered as scarce resources and access requires prior discussion with IT Services

  11. Windows HPC Windows HPC-aware applications can submit work fairly transparently to a remote Windows HPC cluster without leaving the application’s familiar desktop environment but: • The Windows scheduler is not smart enough to handle multiple users with different requirements • No control or reporting by group or project • Little control of individual job resources IT Services have a joint project with Adaptive Computing to run their scheduler on a Windows cluster to address these limitations. This compliments, not replaces, the BlueBEAR Linux service.

  12. Project-specific resources Per-core performance is levelling off or decreasing. Cluster management is expensive, in terms of skills and infrastructure. • We offer to: • Smooth the design and purchase of servers through IT Services’ framework agreement with OCF • Incorporate these servers into the existing cluster using the BlueBEAR infrastructure, including switches, filestore and power • Put policies in place to manage access to these servers as required by the owner. • In return, IT Services ask that: • Jobs belonging to other users can run on these servers when they are not in use, but such jobs will be killed when a job belonging to the owner is queued on these nodes. Users opt-in to these extra resources • Research Councils, especially EPSRC, are usually more sympathetic to this model than funding hardware purely for a single project

  13. Interpret • IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Centre • Partnership with IBM, Mechdyne, NVIDIA and OCF • 4m by 2m Powerwall • Back projected • Active stereo and head tracking

  14. Disseminate • Case studies with partners • Seminars/lectures/workshops

  15. Relationships with other resource providers International and Vendor Services Encore Cloud burst services National Services e.g. Archer MidPlus Regional Service Azure Amazon BlueBEAR

  16. Some research areas using BlueBEAR ... Economics - Optimal voting rules for two - stage committees What voting rules should a committee adopt at the preliminary and final stages if it wishes to efficiently trade off its impatience against a desire to make the right decision?

  17. Some research areas using BlueBEAR ... GEES - Developing a correction for simulated rainfall from global climate change models. Our statistical corrections are shown to outperform some traditional down-scaling approaches and have great potential for application to future simulations.

  18. Some research areas using BlueBEAR ... Psychology- Simulating Social Stigmatisation Existing psychological investigations tell us a lot about the group behaviours that can be observed in small convened groups, but there has been less work with larger groups and many of the emergent effects of small group findings have not been considered.

  19. Some research areas using BlueBEAR ... Mechanical Engineering - Developing Intelligent Tyre Based on Finite Element Analysis and Experiments To develop a strain-based intelligent tyre system which can provide in time tyre information such as force and friction to improve vehicle safety, driving control and ride comfort, etc.

  20. Any questions? www.birmingham.ac.uk/bear

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