Research Computing Panel CSG Seattle '02 Research Computing Support at Penn State

● 82K students ● 4K faculty, 10K staff ● 24 locations ● PA's land grant

Research at Penn State ● 20+ Colleges, Consortia, etc. ● $500M research annually (out of $2.4B total) – Navy, HHS, NSF, NASA etc. make up about half – Industry, state, etc. make up the rest ● Near term areas of emphasis/strength – Life sciences – Children, Youth and Families Consortium – Materials

Goal ● Fill in gaps in research enterprise to: – Make research easier to do – Make research less expensive to do – Reduce time to discovery – Take risks where faculty can't or won't – Lead by example quickly or get out of the way even more quickly

Background ● As with everything else on campus - research, research computing, and research computing support is a highly distributed venture with an amazingly mobile and changing set of spheres of influence ● Fine-grained (PI level) and profound independence

Research Computing Support at PSU ● Software ● Hardware ● Consulting

Software ● Site license mgt for appropriate software – Roots in site licensing for various unix Oses – Includes titles such as SAS, SPSS, Labview, NASTRAN, FIDAP, IDEAS, GAUSSIAN, Mathematica, Matlab, NAG, IMSL, etc. ● We'll seed new acquisitions and help market their usefulness ● Software on our on resources that might fall out of this

Software ● Bioinformatics portal - collection of genomics tools in one place ● ETD support

Hardware ● IBM SP - seeing limited use at this point ● Large memory cluster- AIX based ● Intel clusters – Lion-X (32x2 500MHz PIII) ● Myrinet, GigE, 100Mb – Lion-XE (112x2 1GHz PIII) ● Dolphin, 100Mb – Lion-XL (80+x2 2.4 Ghz PIII) ● Quadrics,100Mb + Bluearc

Hardware (?) ● OpenPBS – Maui scheduler consortium member ● Compilers du jour, numerical libraries ● All hardware acquired via consortium building – We make a technology decision considering many factors, and get others to buy in. In return, they share unused cycles. $ come from lots places: NSF MRI, SCREMS, IGERT, etc. – Also run a co-location center

Hardware (?) ● Visualization – Immersadesk – Immersive Environments Lab – Plotting ● Outside of central IT – Clusters ● small to large clusters out there (16 to 100 nodes) ● We'll help where we can and share all we know ● Many instances of less than efficient operation and performance

Hardware (?) ● Outside of central IT – Clusters ● small to large clusters out there (16 to 100 nodes) ● We'll help where we can and share all we know ● Many instances of less than efficient operation and performance – Visualization ● 3 RAVEs ● C3 (CAVE) in Applied Research Lab

Hardware ● Partnerships – Level 2 iVDGL site – Tobacco $ – Meteorology, Math, Stat, Astrophysics, etc.

Consulting ● Distributed workstation sys admin - cost recovered ● We'll help you build a cluster but will encourage you to see the benefits in partnering with us ● We'll help you port codes to a dist. Mem. Par. computing model ● Statistical consulting done elsewhere - Stat, Social Science Research Institute, Meth. Ctr.

Grid ● Hype:reality ratio is heading back towards one instead of infinity which is a good thing ● We'll try to put a man on on Mars too but if we wind up only getting to the Moon, that'll be OK and still very cool and useful. ● As already mentioned, iVDGL