The Birmingham Environment for Academic Research Setting the Scene Peter Watkins, School of Physics and Astronomy (on behalf of the Blue Bear team)

One starting point Several Schools had computing clusters but very limited campus-wide facilities SRIF 1  Applications Service (capps) running on 6 dual-processor HP J6700 PA-RISC machines  limited disc space – 1 Tbyte

 some areas, for example humanities, have heavy compute, data and visualisation requirements

Major investments in computing at most research-led Universities in recent years through SRIF and other e-science initiatives Midlands e-science Centre (MeSC) (included several Universities in the West Midlands) Access Grid Node – videoconferencing facilities SRIF 2 support from University e-Science cluster of 54 Xeon dual processors Started to build strong campus-wide support for a large cluster dedicated to research computing

Some of the requirements include  Computer hardware (processing, memory, fast interconnect and storage) but there’s more to it than that.... –flexibility –ease of use for non-specialist users –sustainability –reliability

The procurement process  SRIF3 process co-ordinated by Heriot-Watt with the aim of ensuring best value for the funding bodies  strong support from Procurement (Helen Bignell, Keith McKenzie)  external expertise on clusters, especially Daresbury (Martyn Guest, Christine Kitchen) was essential  everything takes longer than expected

A very long process....  February 2005 – bid to University  May 2005 – bid approved by University  September 2005 – initial funds available  March Invitation to Tender submitted to Heriot- Watt, issued 18 April 2006  Easter 2006 (April) – data centre power and cooling upgrade  May 2006 – deadline for return of tenders  January 2007 – selected vendor notified  June 2007 – phase 1 cluster delivered  March 2008 – full cluster installed

First phase installed (May 2007)

 Strategic Collaboration in place between the University and IBM/Clustervision/Mechdyne

Current configuration – Blue Bear  384 dual processor dual core (1536 cores) 8GB ram IBM x3455 Opteron nodes (Linux)  2 quad processor dual core 32 GB ram nodes  Infiniband interconnect throughout  144 TB raw disk (GPFS)  24 TB tape library  8 node - Microsoft compute cluster

Registered users of Blue Bear (>230)  Archaeology and Antiquity  Biosciences  Business School  Computer Science  Chemical Engineering  Chemistry  Civil Engineering  Electronic, Electrical and Computer Engineering  English  Geography, Earth and Environmental Science  Primary Care and General Practice  Health Services Research  Mathematics  Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering  Metallurgy and Materials  Obstetrics and Gynaecology  Public and Environmental Health  Physics and Astronomy  Psychology  Sports and Exercise Science New research work using Blue Bear already published Help us to keep on broadening the user base across the University

Many thanks to all the contributors from the Blue Bear team  Aslam Ghumra  Paul Hatton  Jonathan Hunt  Lawrie Lowe  John Owen  Alan Reed  PMW  Marcin Mogielnicki (Clustervision)

Future plans include  More users meetings – to help existing users and encourage new users from all disciplines  Develop the links with IBM and other partners to support our research projects  Increase related training courses and expertise level of users  Developing University long term support for excellence in research computing