WestGrid Stakeholder Session & Annual General Meeting

October 10, 2018Vancouver, BC

WestGrid Update

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WestGrid Key Activities 2017-18

ARC Leadership

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“I would like to thank the Working Group members who have spent the last nine months with me locked in rooms and on countless phone calls - you have been a highly dedicated group of people who have brought tremendous expertise and commitment to this task. It has been such a pleasure to work with you.”

- Robbin Tourangeau, LCDRI

Partnership: Precision Infection Management (PIM)

“Thank you so much Sergei and Lindsay for your contributions on this project! The serious computational muscle gave this project real legitimacy and I am very grateful to both of you for making this a reality! Thanks Lindsay! You are a rockstar, this wouldn't have been possible without your support!”

- Ian Lewis, LSARP Project Lead

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Bioinformatics Helpdesk

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133 subscribed users

22 question posts since launch in january

79 total questions in database

4 one-on-one sessions

6 questions via contact form

Advocacy

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Unique Culture

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The West is the Best

● Collaborative● Social● Likeminded “get it

done” attitude● Altruistic

Summary of WestGrid Value

★ Leadership★ HQP development★ Funding diversification★ Cost savings to members★ Education, Outreach & Training★ Engagement & advocacy★ Addressing user need ★ Improving user experience

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Projects & Outreach

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Co-op Students“I am honored to have worked with so many people who were so passionate about their career, as well as the well-being of our industry. It was truly an amazing experience that I will never forget."-- Steven Bucholtz, Okanagan College Student, Computer Information Services

“This was the perfect opportunity for us to learn how to set up a site from nothing. That everyone is approachable and willing to help without judgement or any hesitation. This opportunity is something I will never forget so again thank you for everything."-- Christina Hebert, Okanagan College, Computer Information Sciences

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Re-developed Status Page

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CANHEIT-TECC

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● Largest conference ever held at SFU Burnaby campus

● Almost 700 attendees● 130 total sessions, over

100 hours of programming including the Women in Technology Breakfast,

● Over 30 staff from the Compute Canada federation presented in nearly 20 sessions over 3 days!

Survey Numbers: WestGrid User Survey &

Accounts RenewalsErin Trifunov

Manager, Projects and OutreachWestGrid

WestGrid User Survey - 2017

“The services provided by Westgrid are invaluable and our organization would be substantially less

productive without WestGrid's assistance. Some of our research would have been impossible without

WestGrid.” - University of Victoria, Environmental & Earth Sciences Research Staff

GOAL: Awareness of Services

Increase awareness of specialized support services, especially Bioinformatics support.

GOAL: WestGrid User Support

23%

incr

ease

Increase awareness of and offerings of support

GOAL: Training & Outreach

Increase awareness of and offerings of support for new users & in-person sessions.

In 2017-18 we delivered:• 1000s hrs, 42 events• 800+ RSVPs, 42% new users• 2 regional summer schools• 24 Software Carpentry events• 11 WestGrid Town Halls• 6 Viz workshops• SMT visits to all 7 sites

New User Support

2 In-person HPC Summer Schools

New website for training materials - simpler to use

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Visualize This!

National competition led by WestGrid’s Visualization and Training Coordinator Alex Razoumov

GOAL: Overall Satisfaction

2018 Compute Canada Renewal Survey Overall Satisfaction with Compute Canada(8675 respondents, 2581 from within WestGrid, 37% PIs)

2017 WestGrid User SurveyOverall Satisfaction with Compute Canada(283 respondents, 28% PIs)

Provide more targeted user support for RAC.

RAC User Support

● RAC Best Practices presentations from WG Director of Operations (3 hrs+ each)○ 2017: 2 Sites + 1 Virtual○ 2018: 6 Sites + 2 Virtual

● RAC User Guides, Slides and Site Analysis

2018-19 Goals & Opportunities

Build awareness of WestGrid services and value to stakeholders.

User Support

12% -->Down from 56% in 2016

● 11% DO NOT have adequate local support (21% from UofA, 16% from UVIC & SFU)

● 20% “didn’t know” (25% from UBC, 15% UofA)

● 35% of less experienced users felt DO HAVE adequate local support, 38% unsure

GOAL: Increase awareness of and advocate for more local support presence.

User Growth vs Staffing

From 2013-2018, CC users from WestGrid based institutions

INCREASED 580%WestGrid FTE levels from 2013-2018 increased by only 66%

Need for Local Support

“I strongly believe that the usefulness of Compute Canada in general, and of Westgrid in particular, is a

direct function of the strong local support.” - Manitoba Principal Investigator

New Opportunities

Explore opportunities to meet resource needs and users outside CC scope.

Resources Needs

Future needs

Industry Activity

Operations update

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Highlights

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New Cloud Sept, 2016Oct 2018

Arbutus (UVictoria)Major additional capacity (cores and storage)

New GP systems Summer, 2017Autumn 2017-2018

Cedar (SFU), Graham (Waterloo)Major Cedar upgrade: ~2x increase in cores! Planned doubling in storage.

New LP system April, 2018 Niagara (Toronto)

Defunding old systems 2017/2018 Grex (UManitoba, Mar 31, 2018)Parallel/Lattice (UCalgary, Mar 31, 2018)Hungabee/Jasper (UofA, Oct.1, 2017)Silo (USask, Jan.31, 2017)

Migration 2017-2018 Migrate users from legacy to new systems(WestGrid led the CC Migration Working Group)

New System support:Software, Documentation and Training

2017-2018 Complete new software distribution system (CVMFS).Comprehensive new software suite.Full re-write of user docs.Lead by Research Support National Team: extensive WG involvement.

Support Tickets

April-May 2018: transition from WG OTRS ticketing system to CC central ticketing system.● Statistics are from June 1, 2018 (CC OTRS ticketing system)

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Total CC tickets in all queues 6,800

Total WG tickets in all queues 2,266 (33%) WG users: ~30%

Average WG tickets per month in all queues

566 Includes CC accounts and software install tickets.

Average tickets per month in WG queues

344 WG OTRS 2017: 397

WG Tickets per Month

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March-April-May:● WG OTRS to Central CC OTRS

March-April● Account renewals

April● Allocations implemented

Monthly Mean (June 1-Oct.1)● 344 (WG OTRS 2017 was 396)

WG Tickets in separate WG OTRS system

Top Responders

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1 Ali Kerrache University of Manitoba 889

2 Daniel Stubbs Université de Montréal 658

3 Maxime Boissonneault

Université de Laval 518

4 Doug Phillips University of Calgary 290

5 Roman Baranowski UBC 227

6 Erick Giguere Université de Sherbrooke 143

7 Belaid Moa University of Victoria 138

8 Ross Dickson Dalhousie University 133

9 Pier-Luc St-Onge McGill University 129

10 Charles Coulombe Université de Laval 126

15 Grigory Shamov Manitoba 94

18 Martin Siegert SFU 84

19 Dmitri Rozmanov Calgary 79

30 Ataollah Roudgar SFU 51

32 Kamil Marcinkowski Alberta 48

34 John Simpson Alberta 47

40 Malcolm Petch UBCO 36

44 Adam McKenzie Sask 31

48 Robert Fridman Calgary 24

49 Chris Want Alberta 22

Past Events General Jan/Feb Meltdown bug fixes

Arbutus Feb 16 Bug in Openstack High Availability network implementation● HA was removed after about 2 weeks of instability.

Graham Aug.21 to Sep.5(ongoing recovery)

Facility upgrade to dual 3MW transformers.● Two separate UPS systems backed by their own generator.● /project filesystem corruption: 2% of files needed to be restored from

tape (8M files!). See https://status.computecanada.ca (Sept.5) for details. Note that restore has only just completed.

● Also seem to be some remaining filesystem issues (/home).

Cedar Aug 30 Router and switch firmware upgrade. Vancouver link is now 100 GBit!About 60 minutes. Jobs continued to run.

August New Atlas Tier 1 is in production.Data migration from old to new is complete.

Arbutus July 22 BCNet network maintenance - short disruptions to cloud network access.

Upgrades and Maintenance

Orcinus October 2 day power systems maintenance.

Orcinus Mar.31, 2019 Defunding! Last of the WestGrid legacy systems.

Cedar Oct.15-19 1 week major outage● OS updates (to CentOS 7.5)● Related Lustre and Omnipath upgrades● Intel OPA (Omnipath) Cable issues

Cedar Planning 1. ownCloud upgrade2. Nearline (tape) service (ready for RAC 2019)3. Cloud partition

Graham Oct 9-10 Electrical work by regional utility with complete outage.

Arbutus cloud

October 3, 2018In progress.

Major outage for cloud expansion● Additional ~1,400 cores and 3.5 PB usable storage.● DB service with 2 new DBaaS nodes● New Openstack version.

WG RAC 2018 Stats

Number of Applications from Members 149

Number of Applications receiving an allocation

147 99% of WG applications received some allocation.

Average science score 3.33 Lower limit was 2.0CC average was 3.33

Number of GPU asks 21 451 CY allocated

Descriptor Score Patrick’s CommentsExceptional 5 This is almost never given, and is only for the highest quality research and proposal.Outstanding 4 Excellent science, excellent technical approaches with high quality proposals.Very strong 3 Small impressions can make a difference between “Strong” and “Very Strong”Strong 2 RAC 2018 cutoff was 2.0, so “Strong” proposals are insufficient for an allocation!Moderate 1 A passable proposal with no significant issues.Insufficient 0 Significant issues either scientific or technical.

RAC Resource Shortfall

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The major issue by far is the lack of resources. The basic numbers are shortfalls of 2x in computational cores (ask is about 50% of available), and 5x in GPU cores across Compute Canada. Similar numbers are expected for RAC 2019 after legacy systems are defunded and the new GP4 system is installed.

The overwhelming impression from a detailed re-reading of the RAC 2018 WestGrid proposals is that of well-written, well-justified asks from competent and generally experienced teams. The prevalent complaint from the survey, RAC proposals and informal discussion is that of very long queue times and inability to acquire sufficient resources to carry out a research program.

So a strong recommendation is that WestGrid should consider acquiring additional resources.

Note: institutions are re-purposing legacy systems or acquiring new hardware for institutional ARC.

Under Pressure!

RAC -2018 Results

GPU’s Really Bad

RAC 2018: 21% of asks allocated!

GPUs and Machine Learning

● Major increase in GPU asks!○ Machine Learning is the major use○ Increasing demand for production training

● Both Cedar and Graham have GPUs (P100’s)○ Béluga will have lots of them!○ Current estimate on linear extrapolation: <30% of asks can be satisfied!

● Future Compute Canada planning○ Opportune time as CC is working with ISED and Federal Gov’t for DRI.

GPU requests will require very strong

justifications.

Machine Learning

# WG asks

Average (median) GY per ask

Component 17 11% 23 (96) Projects which use Machine Learning as a component of the proposed methods

Research 4 3% 87 (5) Projects which are actively researching machine learning algorithms.

Platforms and Portals

WestGrid RPP 2018 Applications

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Portals (large) 16 64%

Platforms (smaller) 6 24%

External portal 3 12%

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The Research Platforms and Portals (RPP) Competition enables communities to develop research projects that improve access to shared datasets, enhance existing online research tools and facilities, or advance national or international research collaborations.

Up from 0 three years ago!

RPP Development and Management● NO DIRECT SUPPORT OFFERED BY CC.● There is a need for such tier 3 support

○ Requests for support.○ Tickets for specific sysadmin help.○ Security breaches due to naive sysadmin.

● WG has expertise○ Cloud National Team (WG-centred) provides tier 2

support○ Sysadmin generally

● WG providing some support (.5 FTE for LSARP)● CC has Middleware national team developing

useful services (like single-sign-on)

WG Proposal to hire jr developer/devops

RAC Best Practices

University of Manitoba Monday September 17

University of Victoria Thursday September 20

University of Alberta Monday September 24

University of Calgary Thursday September 27

University of British Columbia Friday October 12

Simon Fraser University Thursday October 11

Online: Compute Canada Public Q&A Thursday October 4

Online recap and office hours: Mid-October

RAC Best Practices on-site presentations from WG Director of Operations1. Introduction by site teams (½ hour, site-dependent)2. WestGrid Introduction by Patrick (½ hour)3. RAC Best practices by Patrick (1 hour)

Plus Researcher Consultation lead by Patrick (1 hour as necessary)

WestGrid Annual General Meeting

Member Confirmation

Institution Voting Member Representative Attending:

UBC Steve Cundy, Director of ARC (Proxy) Remote

SFU No member in attendance

UVic Wency Lum, CIO (Proxy) Remote

UofC No member in attendance

UofA Walter Dixon, AVP(R) Remote

USask Dena McMartin, AVP(R) In person

UofM James Kerr, Director of Technology Services Remote

1. Call to Order & Member Representative Confirmation2. Approval of Agenda3. Approval of Financial Statements4. Appointment of Public Accountant5. Approval of Director Terms6. Other Business7. Adjournment

Agenda

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