HPCx:an Overview Dr Arthur Trew Director, EPCC

210 February 2004IBM Team Talent Meeting what is HPCx? HPCx is the latest in a series of HPC services for UK academia –£52.9M from UK Research Councils –£1M from IBM for HPC R&D at EPCC –£600k from IBM for Life Sciences outreach UoE HPCx Ltd runs the contract –wholly-owned subsidiary of the the University –CCLRC, EPCC and IBM are subcontractors EPSRC’s objectives for the procurement were –“ to deliver the optimum service resulting in world-leading science” –“ address the problems in scaling codes to capability levels (512+)” … so, the challenges we face are to –support change from capacity to capability –develop more scalable codes science support is the key to success

310 February 2004IBM Team Talent Meeting the story so far Phase 1 service started on 9 December 2002 The first year was extremely successful –CPU utilisation grown to >80% –25+ user groups, ~350 users

410 February 2004IBM Team Talent Meeting … but the colony switch did have poor performance and reliability MetricTSLFSLJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDecAve Technology serviceability (%) Technology MTBF (hours)   300 Number of AV FTEs Number of training days per month 30/ 12 40/ 12 10/117/217/324/433/533/633/733/835/940/1 0 49/1 1 50/1 2 queries esolved <3 days (%) Number of A&M FTEs A&M serviceability (%)

510 February 2004IBM Team Talent Meeting looking forward the Phase 1  Phase 2 upgrade most risky part of the project –new hardware, colony  federation –new software, PSSP  CSM EPSRC has funded small Phase 2 development machine –so, the support teams are more prepared –but switch performance is (currently) poor –… and unlikely to satisfy EPSRC termination is unlikely but the relationship with EPSRC could be less cordial post-Phase 2