1. HPCx Power for the Grid Dr Alan D Simpson HPCx Project Director EPCC Technical Director

2. 2September 2003HPCx HPCx Overview UKs major HPC facility, primarily funded by EPSRC £53M/6 year contact awarded to UoE HPCX Ltd –wholly-owned subsidiary of University of Edinburgh –work subcontracted to CCLRC (DL), EPCC and IBM Largest academic supercomputer in Europe –doubling in performance every 2 years

3. 3September 2003HPCx HPCx Objectives Deliver capability computing for world-leading science Capability Computing –jobs which use a significant fraction of the resource, eg, at least 512 CPUs Collaboration between HPCx and users through the Terascaling process Maximise benefits to the UKs computational science and engineering community Forging links between HPC and e-Science High quality support is the key to success

4. 4September 2003HPCx Partnership EPCC and CCLRC –are partners in C 3 ES (Consortium for Capability Computing and e-Science) –underpinned by MoU between UoE and CCLRC –combines Europes foremost academic HPC, e-Science and technology transfer centres –virtual organisation facilitated by Access Grid –significant experience of: operating national HPC services developing capability applications –the strongest UK partnership ever to support scientific computing

5. 5September 2003HPCx Virtual Organisation Outreach Life sciences New applications Applications Support Helpdesk Training Liaising with users Users Technology Software Engineering Underpinning technology Grid/e-Science Systems & Networking Flexible and responsive capability computing service Smooth transitions between phases Terascaling Capability applications Scalable algorithms Performance optimisation Dual-centre functional support teams

6. 6September 2003HPCx HPCx Utilisation successful first 9 months >75% utilisation for last 6 months capability usage has increased to 35%

7. 7September 2003HPCx HPCx and the Grid Key responsibility for Software Engineering team –led by Dr Stephen Booth who is also responsible for EPCCs Grid operations HPCx is committed to support access via Grid –currently provided through Globus 2 –Globus 3 support when appropriate HPCx is key part of UK collaboration with Extensible Teragrid Facility project in the US –promoting UK science on the world stage

8. 8September 2003HPCx ETF Collaboration Focus is exploiting unique features of Grid + HPC systems for capability computing –`HPCy-class applications Initial experiment planned for SC2003 –RealityGrid computational steering –HPCx is major compute resource Current challenges are: –network bandwidth –lack of direct network connections to compute nodes developing port-forwarding software to allow Globus IO connections to batch jobs

9. 9September 2003HPCx Summary HPCx builds on significant complementary experience at EPCC and DL Very successful start –…with capability usage already up to 35% Committed to e-Science and the Grid –strong links with NeSC and CCLRC e-Science Centre –ETF experiment at SC2003 HPCx is focussed on capability computing –world-class service for world-class research