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DiRAC@GRIDPP

www.dirac.ac.uk – please look at our wiki! Part of the new national e-Infrastructure http:// www.bis.gov.uk/policies/science/science-funding/elc

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DiRAC@GRIDPP

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  1. www.dirac.ac.uk – please look at our wiki! • Part of the new national e-Infrastructure http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/science/science-funding/elc • Provides Advanced IT services for Theoretical and Simulation research in Particle Physics, Particle Astrophysics, Cosmology, Astrophysics and Solar System Science [90%] • And for Industry, Commerce and Public Sector [10%] • Given the mission of investigating and deploying cutting edge technologies (hardware and software) in a production environment • Erk! We are a play pen as well as a research facility DiRAC@GRIDPP

  2. DiRAC uses the standard Research Council Facility Model. • Academic Community oversight and supervision of Technical staff • Regular reporting to Project Management Board. This includes Science Outcomes • Outcome driven resource allocation -no research outcomes no research • Sound Familiar? Community Run

  3. Standard Facility Model • Oversight Committee (Meets twice yearly); Chair Foster (Cern) • Project Management Board (meets monthly); Chair Davies (Glasgow) • Technical Working Group (every fortnight); Chair Boyle (Edinburgh) • Project Director; Yates (UCL) • PMB sets strategy, policy and considers reports on equipment usage and research outcomes – 10 members • TWG members deliver HPC services and undertake projects for the Facility (8 members) Structure

  4. Monte Carlo – particle based codes for CFD and solution of PDEs • Matrix Methods – Navier-Stokes and Shrodingers equations • Integrators – Runge-Kutta, ODEs • Numerical lattice QCD calculations using Monte Carlo methods Computational Methods

  5. 22 September 2011; DiRAC invited to submit a 1 page proposal to BIS to upgrade systems and make them part of the baseline service for the new National E-Infrastructure. • Assisted by STFC (Trish, Malcolm and Janet) • Awarded 14M for Compute and 1M for Storage. Strict Payment Deadlines (31/03/2012) imposed. • Reviewed by Cabinet Office under the Gateway Review Mechanism • Payment Profiles agreed with BIS Where are we going - DiRAC-2

  6. Owning kit and paying for admin support at our sites works best – a hosting solution seems to get by far the mostest. • Rapid deployment of 5 systems using local HEI procurement • Buying access via SLA/MoU – is simply not as good – just another user. SLAs don't always exist! • Excellent Research outcomes – papers are flowing from the service • Had to consolidate from 14 systems to 5 systems How has it gone

  7. Final System Specs below. Costs include some Data Centre Capital Works New Systems III

  8. Now have Independent Peer Review System • People apply for time; just like experimentalists do! • First Call – 21 proposals! Over contention • Central Budget from STFC for power and support staff (4FTE) • Will need to leverage users' local sys admin support to assist with DiRAC • We do need a cadre of developers to parallelise and optimise existing codes and to develop new applications • Working with Vendors and Industry to attract more funds. • Created a common login and reporting environment for DIRAC using EPCC-DL SAFE system – crude identity management User Access to Resources

  9. In Progress: Authentication/access for all our users to the allowed resources. Using SSH and Database updating cludge. • In Progress: Usage and System Monitoring – using SAFE initially • Networking Testing in concert with Janet • GPFS Multi-Clustering – multi-clustering enables compute servers outside the cluster serving a file system to remotely mount that file system. TWG Projects

  10. GPFS Multi-Clustering • Why might we want it – you can use ls, cp, mv etc. Much more intuitive for humble users and no ftp-ingivolved. • Does it work over long distances (WAN)? Weeell – perhaps • Offer from IBM to test between Edinburgh and Durham, both DiRAC GPFS sites. Would like to test simple data replication workflows. • Understand and quantify identity and UID mapping issues. How YUK are they? Can SAFE help sort these out or do we need something else? • Extend to the Hartree Centre, another GPFS site. Perform more complex workflows. • Extend to Cambridge and Leciester – non IBM sites. IBM want to solve inter-operability issues

  11. New Management Structure • Project Director (me) in place and Project Manager now funded at 0.5FTE level. 1 FTE System Support at each of the four Hosting Sites • Need to sort out sustainability of Facility • Tied to the establishment of the N E-I LC's 10 years Capital and Recurrent investment programme (~April 2014?) • We can now perform Research Domain Leadership Simulations in the UK • Need to federate access/authentication/monitoring systems middleware that actually works, is easily usable AND is easy to manage. • Need to Federate Storage to allow easier workflow and data security The Near Future

  12. Some Theoretical Physics – The Universe (well, 12.5% of it)

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