HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING g
the work done on OpenHPC. In addition to supporting this opt-in mentality to the feature set, OpenHPC also provides tools for multiple HPC architectures. ‘When we started we were just doing
builds for X86, but we added Arm a couple of years ago and, one of the things I find to be pretty valuable is that, from a user point of view, the environment is really the same. The packages are named the same way. While they might be built differently and have different dependencies, from the point of view of a user who wants to get on and compile some code, and run some jobs into the resource manager, it looks basically identical,’ said Schulz.
Managing HPC infrastructure Recently Bright Computing released details of a project to deliver its tools to the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), part of New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) NeSI is a collaboration of four institutions, including NIWA, working to provide HPC, analytics data and consultancy services to the science sector, government initiatives/ agencies, and industry in New Zealand. When HPC requirements threatened to
exceed NIWA and NeSI’s resource capacity, they looked towards a future-focused upgrade that included OpenStack and cloud technologies. NeSI chose to partner with Cray and Bright Computing, who provided the hardware and software tools necessary for this new approach to the country’s eScience Infrastructure. The proposed solution needed to enable
two disparate locations to share data and practices with the primary systems residing in Wellington, and the backup system housed in Auckland. The system was also required to consolidate HPC investments into a single facility – including a large HPC cluster closely coupled to a Cray XC-class supercomputer located in Wellington, and a disaster recovery site in Auckland – to increase performance and reduce datacentre complexity. OpenStack was chosen to manage an on-premise cloud environment and the NeSI staff wanted this new solution to reduce the overall cost and management requirements. Cray was selected for the hardware with an integrated OpenStack platform, and it partnered with Bright Computing to interpret NIWA and NeSI’s system requirements and help NeSI build a hybrid HPC and private cloud infrastructure, based on Bright Cluster Manager and Bright OpenStack. Involving months of investigation,
collaborative design, and solution realignment, Bright Computing and the combined Cray, NIWA and NeSI teams
8 Scientific Computing World December 2019/January 2020
”We get accurate results quickly. It shortcuts our development of the car, and gets quicker lap times sooner”
finalised a new infrastructure which includes three clusters, in part managed by Bright solutions. One cluster coupled to each of the Cray XC-class supercomputers, and a third cluster for development, test, training, and education. Bright Cluster Manager lets users administer clusters as a single entity, provisioning the hardware, operating system and workload manager from a unified interface. Once your cluster is up and running, the Bright cluster management daemon keeps reports of any problems it detects in the software or hardware. The software includes node
provisioning, a graphical user interface (GUI), comprehensive monitoring which can monitor, visualise and analyse a set of hardware and software metrics, plus GPU management and cloud-bursting features. Bright OpenStack is designed to easily deploy, manage and operate cloud infrastructure. The software sims to provide deployment on bare metal, advanced
monitoring and management tools and dynamic health-checking, all in a single package. The single interface makes it easier to build a robust cloud with existing resources through its installation wizard, allowing users to install on bare-metal and configure OpenStack systems using role assignments. New Zealand’s research, science and
innovation minister, Dr Megan Woods, said: ‘This marks a step change for science in New Zealand and a further advancement towards an innovative, future-focused society. ‘The supercomputers are a significant
upgrade with 10 times the computing capability of their predecessor. This will have a whole range of benefits for scientific research, including better understanding issues around climate change, genomics, the management of New Zealand’s freshwater assets and resilience to natural hazards. ‘One of its key uses will be to advance
weather forecasting, enabling more precise forecasts and helping to refine forecasting of climate extremes and hazardous events. Improved weather forecasts will enhance the ability of critical services, such as Fire and Emergency New Zealand, to both identify and manage hazards. It will also help farmers and environmental managers make more informed decisions, using the best information available,’ Woods continued. ‘This investment of $23m represents
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