high-performance computing


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management. Using a GUI and a few mouse clicks, administrators can easily accomplish tasks that were previously command line driven and requiring numerous ad hoc tools. Tere is now consistency in our approach to any problem – glitches are easy to diagnose and solve,’ Willbanks concluded.


Managing change While soſtware can take some the sting out of managing HPC resources, many academic institutions must turn to open-source soſtware because they cannot afford the licences required for commercial soſtware. At Durham University the HPC team are


taking delivery of the latest hardware addition to their COSMA system. Tis new system, originally from STFC, is due to go into full


WE DO NOT WANT THE UK TO LOSE THE EDGE WITH REGARD TO RESEARCH


COMPETITION THE SYSTEM FROM THE STFC WAS A WELCOME ADDITION AT AROUND 8,000 CORES


production on 1 April as part of Durham University’s Institute of Computational Cosmology (ICC). Te ICC currently houses COSMA 4,


which is the main production system for its users, and COSMA 5 the DiRAC-2 Data


6 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD


Centric system, which serves the DiRAC community of astrophysics, cosmology, particle physics and nuclear physics as part of the DiRAC integrated supercomputing facility. In June 2016 the centre obtained COSMA6;


this system is currently being set up and configured, and is expected to go into service in April 2017. Dr Lydia Heck, senior computer manager in the Department of Physics at Durham University, explained that it is not just soſtware but the supercomputers themselves where academic institutions need to save money as the COSMA 6 system was given to the centre by the STFC. ‘We were waiting for Dirac-3; we are


currently at Dirac-2 but this new system will be a considerably larger amount of money that is under consideration as part of the ‘national e-infrastructure,’ stated Heck. ‘While we are waiting, we do not want the


UK to lose the edge with regard to research competition. Te system from the STFC was a welcome addition at around 8,000 cores – it is not a small system,’ said Heck. Heck explained that Durham and the


ICC did not need to pay for this new system but it did need to pay for transport, set-up and configuration – a complex and time- consuming task. However, getting the system up and running was not the only hurdle the team had to overcome, as they needed to learn a new workload management system, SLURM, which the team is using for the new COSMA 6 system. ‘Te two previous systems, COSMA 4


and COSMA 5, are currently using LSF with a GPFS file system – but the new system


COSMA 6 will be running SLURM and using a Lustre file system,’ stated Heck, adding that this has caused some complications – but, ultimately, the university cannot afford to extend the LSF licence to the new system. ‘We hope that once COSMA 6 is in full


production we can convert the other two clusters into the SLURM set-up,’ commented Heck. ‘At the moment it is a little more complicated, but that also makes access more complex. Te users do not log in to each computer; they access the system via login nodes. Currently we have two sets of log-in nodes; one set is for access to COSMA 4 and COSMA 5, and then we have log-in nodes for COSMA 6.’


HPC at Lawrence Livermore Te SLURM workload manager was first developed at Livermore National Laboratory in California around 15 years ago, explained Jacob Jenson, COO and vice president of marketing and sales at SchedMD. ‘Te lab was not happy with the resource managers that were available on the market at that time, so they decided to develop their own,’ stated Jenson. Te team originally stated with a small


team of around seven developers who decided to make their own workload manager through an open-source project under the General Public Licence (GPL). ‘Over the course of about 10 years from 2000 to 2010 the developers went from a team of seven down to two,’ reported Jenson. At that point the last two developers saw


the potential of further development of the soſtware and decided to leave the lab


@scwmagazine l www.scientific-computing.com ➤


Timofeev Vladimir/Shuterstock.com


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