1. A quick introduction to CamGrid University Computing Service Mark Calleja

2. http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/ CamGrid : a federated collection of computers CamGrid in a nutshell: A few hundred machines, giving ~1,200 cores, spread around the university. Coordinated by the University Computing Service (UCS). Uses the Condor software to weave the machines together. Batch system – i.e. jobs run unattended. All Linux (various distributions), mainly 64 bit. There are currently 13 groups, each of which provide their own “pool”, which is then allowed to cooperate (“flock”) with the other pools.

3. http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/ CamGrid: participating groups Astrophysics Biological Sciences Biological and Soft Systems Cambridge eScience Centre Chemistry Earth Sciences High Energy Physics Materials Science National Institute for Environmental eScience Oncology Plant Sciences Semiconductor Physics University Computing Service

4. http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/ CamGrid: what are the benefits? Currently free at point of use. Ideal for parameter sweeps (i.e. many independent jobs). A couple of users have churned through millions of CPU hours. Great for pump priming research, even student project work. Supports checkpointing (with caveats) for long running jobs. Users need access to only one machine, i.e. a submit host (this is an example of the grid computing paradigm). Job submission is achieved by writing a simple text submit-file (don’t worry: the documentation is comprehensive and I run regular introductory courses). So far we’ve had >20M CPU hours, with ~100 attributed publications.

5. http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/ CamGrid: contacts Mark Calleja: mc321@cam.ac.uk Online documentation at: http://camgrid.csx.cam.ac.uk

6. (How) can the UCS help my research? University Computing Service Paul Mazumdar

7. http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/ Training for Scientific Computing Python o Introductory courses o Numerical programming o Regular expressions o [Building Condor jobs] MPI MATLAB Mathematica Fortran, R, Stata…

8. http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/ Managed Virtualised Machines Xen farm Installation images for various Linux distributions or recent versions of Windows Server http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/virtual/

9. http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/ Cloud/IaaS storage Built using Openstack Scalable, resilient, robust… Coming soon!

10. http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/ Managed Web Service Apache/Solaris with MySQL, PHP, Perl, Raven… group.cam.ac.uk namespace provides ‘neutral territory’ for collaborators

11. http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/ Further information If you want to know more, contact institution-strategy@ucs.cam.ac.uk