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User Support in DEISA/PRACE

User Support in DEISA/PRACE. EEF meeting 2 November 2010, Geneva Jules Wolfrat/Axel Berg SARA. Outline. User communities Application enabling User services User support. DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative (DECI).

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User Support in DEISA/PRACE

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  1. User Support in DEISA/PRACE EEF meeting 2 November 2010, Geneva Jules Wolfrat/Axel Berg SARA

  2. Outline user support User communities Application enabling User services User support

  3. DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative (DECI) • DECI launched in early 2005 for complex, demanding, innovative simulations requiring the exceptional capabilities of DEISA • Multi-national proposals especially encouraged • Proposals reviewed by national evaluation committees • Most appropriate supercomputer architecture selected for each project • (IBM BlueGene, IBM Power6, CRAY XT, Intel based (Nehalem), NEC SX) • Computing time granted in combination with enabling support (3-9 PM’s per project) user support

  4. DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative DECI call 2005 51 proposals, 12 European countries involved, co-investigator from US) 30 mio cpu-h requested 29 proposals accepted, 12 mio cpu-h awarded (normalized to IBM P4+) DECI call 2006 41 proposals, 12 European countries involved co-investigators from N + S America, Asia (US, CA, AR, ISRAEL) 28 mio cpu-h requested 23 proposals accepted, 12 mio cpu-h awarded (normalized to IBM P4+) DECI call 2007 63 proposals, 14 European countries involved, co-investigators from N + S America, Asia, Australia (US, CA, BR, AR, ISRAEL, AUS) 70 mio cpu-h requested 45 proposals accepted, ~30 mio cpu-h awarded (normalized to IBM P4+) DECI call 2008 66 proposals, 15 European countries involved, co-investigators from N + S America, Asia, Australia 134 mio cpu-h requested ( 42 proposals accepted, 48 mio cpu-h awarded (normalized to IBM P4+) DECI call 2009 75 proposals, 19 European countries involved, co-investigators from US, China, Japan, Israel 220 mio cpu-h requested (normalized to IBM P4+) 50 proposals accepted, 60 mio cpu-h awarded (normalized to IBM P4+) DECI call 2010 122 proposals, 24 European countries involved, co-investigators from N-America, Asia 540 mio cpu-h requested (normalized to IBM P4+) user support

  5. Virtual communities • “A virtual scientific community is a group of people, often researchers and students, who share multiple resources related to the scientific field and whose main medium of communication is the internet” – Wikipedia • DEISA has no definition of a virtual community but seeks to offer an alternative access mechanism for larger, loosely or closely coupled European research consortia to access DEISA facilities for a longer period of time than a DECI project can guarantee • The Virtual Community is given an allocation of DEISA resources • Responsibility for the allocation of resources amongst the members of the community is delegated to the community user support

  6. Virtual Communities EFDA EUFORIA (Fusion Research) ENES (Climate Research) LFI-PLANCK VIRGO (Astrophysics) VPH VIROLAB (Life Sciences) user support

  7. PRACE user support • PRACE services started by July 1st 2010 • Calls for project proposals with a centrally managed European peer review procedure • Virtual Community support also planned • Model for user support is currently being setup, following DEISA experiences

  8. Application support “Applications Enabling” Objectives “... enhance the scientific applications to adequately cope with a production infrastructure characterized by an aggressive parallelism on heterogeneous architectures at European scale. Applications come from the DECI, Virtual Communities and EU projects.” “Enhancing Scalability” Objectives “... to support enabling effort by enhancing the scalability of the scientific applications” Work is done as a joint research with PI and partners user support

  9. Application support Workflow Target applications are mainly selected from DECI: WP7 connection Virtual Communities: strong European communities of researchers Others: European Projects Applications are categorized by the kind of enabling effort required and the target architectures Once Home and Exec sites are assigned, enabling effort is assessed with the PI’s Workpackage resources are allocated and enabling is carried on in continuous contact with the PI A reduced number of success cases are selected to pass to enhancement activity user support

  10. DEISA/PRACE User services • Common production environment • Application/services monitoring • Help desk and trouble ticket system • User documentation • Advanced application support user support

  11. DEISA/PRACE Common Production Environment • Defines Common Software Stack for all platforms • As homogeneous as possible within architecture clusters (IBM Power, CRAY XT, IBM BlueGene) • Supported with modules tool • “Module load DEISA/PRACE” sets common environment • Status is monitored with Inca tool • Information available to users user support

  12. Monitoring of the applications availability user support

  13. Inca user support

  14. Central Trouble Ticket System user support • Based on Resource Tracker (RT) • Internally used and for user support (helpdesk) as the central tool for reporting problems or requests • General ticket queue and a queue for each partner site • Access is through a web interface or by e-mail (a user must be a registered user of the infrastructure) • User tickets end up in the general queue • The DEISA helpdesk (a task scheduled to sites on a weekly basis) assigns a ticket to the appropriate site queue (tickets can be cloned too) • User interface different from staff interface • Users are asked to use the DEISA TTS, not the local support facilities – information available to all staff

  15. User Documentation user support

  16. User Documentation • Generation of PDF versions formatted for convenient printing • DEISA FAQ maintained user support

  17. Advanced Application Production Assistance • Actions toward both DECI projects and Virtual Communities to enhance the usage of the user oriented DEISA services, middleware and tools • Presentation on DEISA Services given to DECI users • Covers basic facts on certificates, access mechanisms, job management, accounting information, global file system, data transfer, DCPE, Modules, monitoring and user documentation • Meetings with the members of DECI projects are organized, to establish a work plan for the project, to present the DEISA Services available and to describe the User Support organisation • Fast feedback from the users • Gives a possibility to enhance the use of various DEISA services user support

  18. Interoperability user support • Application enabling – share expertise like is done within DEISA/PRACE? • Link Trouble Ticket systems ? – much effort needed with little output • Sharing user documentation – e.g. about the use of X.509 certificates

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