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2019 January

2

Research Platforms Update

Simon Hood

its-ri-team@manchester.ac.uk
Head of Research IT Infrastructure and Platforms,
Research IT.

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2019 January

3

Local Activities

The DPSF

• Is no more!
• Fully merged into CSF3 now; all users moved over.

CSF Upgrade: CSF2 to CSF3

• OS upgrade — RedHat 6.x to 7.x.
• Mostly done, most users moved over.

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2019 January

4

Regional Activities

Re-Invention: N8-HPC to N8-CIR

• All aspects of CIR.
• Including Cloud — solve the problems once, not eight times!

Research Themes

• Focus this year: Digital Health and Digital Humanities.
• Others: Materials and Manufacturing, Sustainable Infrastructure and Computational Sciences
• Initial workshops — wish list: training, shared infrastructure. . .
• To be actioned. . .

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2019 January

5

Research Lifecycle Programme

Workstream 1: e-Research Infrastructure

• Compute and storage — on-site and Cloud;
• people!

Workstream 2: Research Data Lifecycle/Management

• Research data storage and archive;
• publication and respositories.

Workstream 3: Research Administration

• Grant development, funding management. . .
• Processes, tools, systems, teams. . .

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2019 January

7

First significant UoM investment in CIR ever?

• Now: 971k pounds on new hardware,
• 2 FTEs.
• Plus: 300k pounds on Cloud resources over three years.

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2019 January

8

(True) HPC

• 4096 CPU cores ordered early Dec — now on-site, production r-s-n. . .
  • originally intended for an N8-CIR shared platform;
  • to be used for larger parallel compute jobs (cf. former Polaris);
  • largely aimed at engineers, chemists. . .
• Baseline free to access!
  • Some cost-recovery to be put in place.
  • Light touch process for access (filter).

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2019 January

9

Cloud Resources

Condor

• Bursting into AWS: Spot Market (with hibernation); also urgent work.

Web-Fronted Compute

• R Studio Server and Shiny
• Jupyter

Teaching!

• Comp Sci, Physics. . .

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2019 January

10

Incremental Increase in Computational Capacity and Orchestration

• Annual investment for duration of RLP — 410k this year.
• October workshops:
  • GPUs, (more GPUs. . .); high-mem nodes (1.5 TB RAM).
  • More Cloud resources.
• Order out — ETA April?
• Free to access — email us/Landesk ticket
• Augmented by: PI investments (extra GPUs, MACE + FBMH); also FSE bid being worked on.

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2019 January

11

Procurement of Cloud Resources

Current issues:

• individuals buying via own credit cards;
• no opportunity for aggregated bargaining/discounts —
  • Reserved Instances: up to 60 or perhaps 70% available;
• difficult for Research IT to support;
• data security issues too (GDPR. . .).

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2019 January

12

First Steps:

• Research IT master account in AWS —
  • linked to monthly bill via POISE Framework;
  • aggregate with Podcasting procurement.
• AWS Organizations:
  • Map funded Research Projects to Orgs — billing tags.
• Monthly invoice
  • use tags to re-charge to project accounts.
• IaaS initially.

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2019 January

13

Other Work:

• "Core IT" Services leading on Azure.

Next Steps:

• PaaS, SaaS (e.g., R Studio — via HTTP, Shiny, Hadoop, SQL. . .).
• Similar arrangements for GCP.

How to join the party?

• Talk to us (email) — need account code, but. . .
• . . .early adopters — we need guinea pigs!

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2019 January

14

In a few months. . .

• But we invite your input now!

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2019 January

15

Edge Compute and Satellite Storage

• ITS-Managed storage and compute resources within research groups;
• next year's funding —
• developing ideas and use-cases now!
  • Core Research Facilities in Michael Smith Building;
  • Henry Moseley Lab.
  • You?

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2019 January

16

Databases for Research

• Existing MySQL, MsSQL and Oracle SQL farms.
• SQLaaS?
• Other types of databases: NoSQL. . .
• We invite input!

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2019 January

17

Fit-for-Future RDS Platforms

• GPFS PoC proposed...
• We need an RDS platform (or platforms) fit for the next 10 years!
• We'd love to hear your requirements. . .
• PoC for GPFS mooted.

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2019 January

18

Questions?

its-ri-team@manchester.ac.uk