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Complementary Capability Computing on HPCx Dr Alan Gray. HPCx and HECToR: complementary services. Complementary capability computing. Complementary services provide a unique opportunity to maximise the benefits for UK research HECToR is our leading HPC facility
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HPCx and HECToR: complementary services HPCx User Group Meeting
Complementary capability computing • Complementary services provide a unique opportunity to maximise the benefits for UK research • HECToR is our leading HPC facility • HPCx is our "National Supercomputer", trading overall utilisation in favour of a more flexible servic • The main principles behind providing complementary services are: • to maximise the combined research benefits of HECToR and HPCx for the UK HPC user community; • to ensure that the most appropriate service is chosen for the scientific research to be conducted. HPCx User Group Meeting
HPCx: a more flexible service • HPCx’s operation has been modified to provide a more flexible service • We have adapted policies and enabled new features and functionalities • HPCx can handle more unusual jobs • e.g. jobs that cannot easily or readily be accommodated on HECToR • Certain job classes have adverse impact on overall utilisation on prime national service • but can be accommodated on a complementary service • HPCx users have helped to guide these changes • We visited all consortia with >= 1M AUs remaining HPCx User Group Meeting
HPCx flexibility HPCx User Group Meeting
Flexible Policies • Very long jobs • HPCx now has 48 hour queues, requests for longer jobs will also be considered • Interactive and responsive computing • HPCx now has short high priority 20 minute debug queues • HPCx can now accommodate more flexible access patterns, for example to exploit grid technologies HPCx User Group Meeting
New Features and Functionality • Advanced reservation • HPCx now supports the Highly Available Robust Co-scheduler (HARC) • Allows users to reserve processors for a particular time in the future • Relevant for meta-computing, computational steering and on-line visualisation • You may just wish to reserve a series of processors one afternoon HPCx User Group Meeting
New Features and Functionality • Ensembles of jobs • We have developed functionality which allows multiple independent jobs to be easily submitted from the same job script to run simultaneously • Visualisation • Paraview parallel visualisation tool now installed • Computational steering • We are working directly with consortia to enable this for their specific cases HPCx User Group Meeting
Additional flexibility • Shared memory • A cluster of fat shared-memory nodes • each with several processors under the control of a single operating system • Advantageous for applications that exploit shared memory parallelism and for users with large memory jobs • Accessing the full memory • Under populating the node • Shared memory segments and shared memory parallelism HPCx User Group Meeting
Additional flexibility • Large memory jobs • Phase 4 upgrade of HPCx • Two of the IBM 575+ servers will have 128 GB of memory • Data intensive jobs • HPCx has a significant tape store • Ideally suited for users with a need to archive large amounts of data to tape for local processing HPCx User Group Meeting
How to exploit HPCx’s new flexibility • For the remainder of HPCx, we will (in addition to running the helpdesk) focus our additional support on Complementarity • In particular we will support the new CCC projects in any way we can • Please get in touch with the helpdesk with • questions • suggestions or requests • requirements that cannot easily be met within the current operational policies of HECToR and HPCx • feedback • Guidelines on Complementarity are available at: • http://www.hpcx.ac.uk/support/complementarity/ HPCx User Group Meeting