D6.6: Final report on the PRACE and EuroHPC Operational Services
Creators: name: Filip Stanek
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: Deliverable
HPC
Research infrastructure

description: The deliverable presents the activities done in the 1st extension (January 2022 – June 2022) and the 2nd extension (July 2022 – December 2022) of PRACE-6IP covering the operation and coordination of the PRACE Operational Services. The operation of PRACE distributed HPC infrastructure involves the coordination of a set of services which integrate the Tier-0 systems and a number of national Tier-1 systems into a single pan-European HPC infrastructure. It needs to be mentioned that the 1st extension was reduced to nineteen partners with funded effort, while the 2nd extension reduced the funding further to three partners only to maintain the Generic services. These are of most importance for the general public and PRACE users. The rest of activities in second extension was cancelled with the exemption of services needed for smooth transition from PRACE to new European or national activities like EuroHPC. Such services were provided in a light-weight mode, in-kind by the individual partners. This work is the continuation of the work done by Task 6.1 in the previous period of PRACE-6IP as well as previous PRACE-IP projects to provide continuity to the PRACE Operational Services for the HPC ecosystem.
Twelve Tier-0 systems in five countries were operational in the first half of the year 2022. Furthermore, operational support has been provided to nineteen national Tier-1 systems that provide services for Tier-0 (i.e. as stepping stone towards Tier-0 systems, or to prototype and asses new operational services). These Tier-1 systems are distributed among thirteen different countries, ensuring a wide distribution of the European HPC ecosystem and hosting DECI project call awardees.
Based on the procedures for incident and change management, a set of common services as defined in the PRACE Service Catalogue (Networking, Data, AAA, Monitoring and Generic) has been operated and monitored on a day-by-day basis to assure continuity and integrity of the services.
A new activity from Task 6.2, called "Lightweight virtualization", was introduced to Task 6.1 after the completion of Task 6.2. It resulted in a three-day long workshop in Ljublana (Slovenia), held by PRACE and EuroHPC hosting site representatives.
Further development to establish a new federated approach to PRACE AAI was pursued with work addressing the architecture both from a technical as well as a procedural point of view. A pilot of federated access based on the architecture was done.
The Security Forum, responsible for all security related activities, was also coordinated by Task 6.1. All activities were coordinated with bi-weekly videoconferences of all participating partners to monitor the infrastructure and prevent possible incidents which could cause vulnerabilities on the PRACE RI. A continuous operator on duty service was provided by partners overseeing the state of systems, network, and help desk.
A structured plan to decommission PRACE services after the end of PRACE-6IP, keeping in mind the archival of valued knowledge and data of all the PRACE–IP projects, was setup and executed.
The request from a previous PRACE review to address the topic "Energy consumption monitoring and reduction" in HPC was taken up on top of the standard activities of this task.