Illinois Campus Cluster ProgramUser ForumOctober 24, 2012Illini Union Room 2102:00PM – 3:30PM

Agenda

• Welcome/Introductions• Mission Statement• User Forum Logistics• Overview of Second Instance of

Illinois Campus Cluster• Governance• Open Discussion• Adjourn

Welcome/Introductions

• John Towns– operations manager

• Wayne Louis Hoyenga– lead systems administrator

• Susan John– lead user support

• Martin Biernat– project manager

Mission Statement

Provide a collaborative forum for the Illinois Campus Cluster Program user community  to share knowledge, experiences, and ideas to most effectively utilize the Illinois Campus Cluster Program resources.

User Forum Logistics

• Would like the user community to drive meeting content.

• How often do you want to want to have face-to-face meetings

• Electronic forum? User Portal?• Training?

Overview of Second Instance of Illinois Campus Cluster

• Summary of Overall Environment• Investor Management of

Investments across Instances• Second Cluster Overview• Basic System Configuration• New Capabilities

Summary of Overall Environment:what it means to you

• Create single computing environment– single virtual cluster with multiple instances

incorporated– single queuing across all nodes.

• by default, jobs won’t span clusters, but that is configurable.

• Establish a shared storage environment– all storage visible to both cluster instances– parallel file system (GPFS) spanning cluster

instances • 440TB total initially; >1.5PB capacity

– configurable home directory quotas. 

Investor Management of Investments across Instances

• Compute resources– specify which user’s jobs are supposed to be

run on which instance – users specify which jobs run on which

instances, if desired, within Investor constraints

• Storage resources– investments in storage all part of same storage

pool• visible to all compute resources

– configurable quotas• home directories; project space

Second Cluster Instance Overview

• Mix of Ethernet-only and Ethernet + InfiniBand connected nodes– cost increment for IB enabled nodes– assume 50-100% will be IB enabled

• Mix of CPU-only and CPU+GPU nodes– cost increment for GPUs – assume up to 25% of nodes will have

GPUs

• New storage device– added to shared storage environment

Basic System Configuration• Dell PowerEdge C8220 2-socket Intel E5-

2670 – 8-core Sandy Bridge processors @ 2.60GHz

• Memory configuration options: – 2GB/core, 4GB/core, and 8GB/core

• Options:– InfiniBand FDR (otherwise 1 GigE connection

only)– NVIDIA M2090 Accelerator Units 

• Storage investments via DDN SFA12000– can add in 30TB (raw) increments

New capabilities

• VM hosting and related services– persistent services and other needs directly

related to use of compute/storage resources

• New “fast data transfer” nodes– allow for different protocols of data access

to/from the cluster, e.g.• SAMBA• NFS (being considered)• GridFTP, Globus Online (Globus Transfer)• GFFS (tracking experiments with this elsewhere)

Governance

• Elements of governance structures being established– Executive Steering Committee– Investor Forum– Illinois Campus Cluster Program

Operators

• Structure and process/timeline impacted by establishment of campus IT governance structure

Relationship to Campus IT Governance

• Original Campus Cluster Program not placed into any larger governance structure

• Campus established new IT governance structure early in 2012– http://itgov.illinois.edu/

• Research Committee established– http://itgov.illinois.edu/committees/research/– “charged with recommending strategic directions and

related policies, priorities, and services for IT in support of research.”

– subcommittee to Governance Executive Committee

• Illinois Campus Cluster Program now responsible to Research Committee– currently working through details of modification to

Program governance with Research Committee

Open Discussion

• This is your opportunity to share with the Illinois Campus Cluster Program Team your thoughts.

• Drawing a blank? Think about:– What do you like about the campus cluster?– What areas of the campus cluster program

needs improvement?– What things have you not quite figured out?– What do you spend most of your time doing

when using the campus cluster?– What training do you wish was available?

Adjourn

• Thank you for providing your thoughts.

• Please feel free to contact us at help@campuscluster.illinois.edu