title: Ein Großgerät für die Forschung: Hochleistungsrechnen auf der magnitUDE
Creators: name: Brands, Dominik
name: Gollan, Holger
name: Hasemann, Olaf
Publisher: name: DuEPublico: Duisburg-Essen Publications online, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Year: 2017
Subjects: subject: 004

description: Die technischen Daten und das „Drumherum“ des Wissenschaftlichen Rechnens mit der magnitUDE thematisiert dieser Text des Supportteams des High-Performance Computings an der UDE.
description: In 2010 the first supercomputer
CRAY XT6m at the UDE was
brought into service. Four years later
the demand on HPC-resources at
the UDE has been increased eminently.
Thus, in 2014 the UDE
applied successfully under the supervision
of the CCSS for the financial
support of a new, more powerful
supercomputer. With the grant of 3.3
million € from the German Research
Council in 2015, the supercomputer
magnitUDE was purchased from
NEC and installed in the first half of
2016; it reached rank 279 in the TOP
500 of HPC ranking. Now, nine
months into operation, we can state
that the process to setup a wellworking
HPC-system satisfying the
demands of all researchers was not as
simple as it might look.
The first crucial part was the
definition of the technical criteria for
the tender, since they constrain the
framework of possible configurations
for the potential vendors. In
this context the measurement of the
performance was defined and a suitable
testmatrix of typical applications
of prospective usergroups was composed.
Concurrently, the search for a suitable location for magnitUDE had
to be started, since the resources at
both UDE-campi were not valid or
exhausted. Finally, the UDE rented a
new DataCenter in the logport Duisburg-
Rheinhausen, which will host
further IT-infrastructure of the ZIM
as well. Obviously, the parallel establishment
of the technical criteria
and the location authored a few
dilemmas, e.g. expectable power
consumption. After the installation
another two essential aspects had to
be decided: the scheduling policy for
the computations and the usage
policy. A combination of fairshare
and backfilling strategy was selected
to weight the resource usage by the
usergroup and take into account the
scaling ability of their applications.
Until now this decision has shown a
good exploitation of magnitUDE. To
ensure a robust operation the definition
of user-specific disk quota and
respites of file age were established
in the usage policy as well.
Right at the beginning of the
installation the first extension of
magnitUDE was planned and, thus,
early in 2017 additional 60 compute
nodes were added. With this extension
magnitUDE will hopefully still
be part of the TOP 500 rankings in
2017/18.
In conclusion, the magnitUDE
enables the researchers of the UDE
to improve and demonstrate the performance
of their computational
applications. This opportunity has
not been locally available to the
researchers before and so is a new
resource in the field of HPC at the
UDE.
description: UNIKATE: Berichte aus Forschung und Lehre, no. 50Natur-, Ingenieur- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften - High-Performance und Cloud Computing, p. 116