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Research IT Club 2019 April 04

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2019 October Research IT Club

Simon Hood

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

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Research IT Club 2019 April 04

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There is lots going on!

• More compute resources
• Next generation Research Data Storage
• Cloudy developments (esp. HTC)
• RLP Edge Compute and Satellite Storage — workshops

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Research IT Club 2019 April 04

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Major Development of RIT Condor Pool

Expansion of HTC Resources:

• Queues busy? — spin-up AWS-based compute resources!
• Cost-effective use of Cloud.

Use Cases:

• Work which can wait (for a low Spot price).
• Urgent work (higher Spot price...)
  • Nick Chilton/Daniel Reta!

More development of Condor coming. . .

• Other Cloud providers.
• Cases with a lot of data?

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Research IT Club 2019 April 04

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RLP Update — e-Research Infrastructure

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Research IT Club 2019 April 04

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Incrementally build compute capacity. . .

RLP-funded — now in production:

1. 16 * Nvidia V100 GPUs, 182k.
2. 3 * 1.5 TB RAM compute nodes, 72k.
3. 10 * STD compute nodes (320 cores), 72k.
4. Cloud (AWS) resources, 84k.
   • e.g. for Shiny, Jupyter. . .

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• Soon: 52 Nvidia V100 GPUs available
  • 16 FATPOU; remainder priority to contributors.

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Research IT Club 2019 April 04

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. . .and a second increment. . .

Now on order:

• More standard compute nodes (approx 650 cores).
• More Cloud (AWS) resources.

To be ordered:

• More high memory (1.5 TB RAM) nodes.

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Research IT Club 2019 April 04

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Edge Compute and Satellite Storage

Why

• RI Team look after central compute/storage/VMs + etc.
• Infrastructure local to individual research groups often reqd.
  • Issue: lack of professional support.

What

• RIT to offer a service to build and support such local infra:
  • menu of hardware + of support options (charged).
• Also N1: database-as-a-service.

Workshops

• Reqs capture workshops up-coming. (Get on the RLP list!)

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Research IT Club 2019 April 04

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Highly-Restricted Data

• two * PoCs going ahead this autumn:
  • one in Azure, one in AWS.
• Not too late to feed in requirements.

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Research IT Club 2019 April 04

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More News!

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Research IT Club 2019 April 04

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Success in the Cloud

• 17th Oct
• Main talks:
  • Stepping towards HPC disaster recovery in the Cloud;
  • Protecting Sensitive and Personal Research Data in the Cloud;
  • Cloud Bursting with HTCondor and AWS.
• Lightning talks and
• opportunity to talk to people from AWS.

https://n8cir.org.uk/events/n8-cir-cloud/

(Free lunch too!)

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Research IT Club 2019 April 04

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Research Data Storage needs a re-think. . .

• Isilon served us for eight years
• Now starting a one-year GPFS trial/PoC. . .
• encryption + key management
• satellite storage
• on-site and cloud...
• Ties in to RLP N (Edge Compute & Sat Storage).
• We are looking for guinea-pigs. . . Interested?

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Research IT Club 2019 April 04

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Advanced Linux Algorithms and Numerics (aka CSF4)

• FSE bus case — Paola Carbone + Tim Stallard + SH:
  • 810k to "refresh" existing (EOL) CSF shares.
• Add some RLP M&K funds
• 3200 cores.
• Ordered:
  • New cluster — CentOS 8 + Slurm + GPFS,
  • in production by Christmas?

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its-ri-team@manchester.ac.uk