Research Computing and Facilitating ServicesCLMS Symposium 28th June 2012

Clare GryceHead of Research Computing & Facilitating Services

Research Computing and Facilitating Services

Evolution of existing ISD Research Computing Services Group, to provide:• Leading Research Computing platform services• Scientific Software Development Services

– Programming resource, best practise, academic collaboration

• Research IT Facilitation Services– Single ‘first point of contact’ for advice and

guidance regarding all Research IT Services

0

10

20

30

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60

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0

200,000

400,000

600,000

800,000

1,000,000

1,200,000

1,400,000

1,600,000

1,800,000

2,000,000

Jan-

10

Feb-

10

Mar

-10

Apr-

10

May

-10

Jun-

10

Jul-1

0

Aug-

10

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10

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-10

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-10

Dec

-10

Jan-

11

Feb-

11

Mar

-11

Apr-

11

May

-11

Jun-

11

Jul-1

1

Aug-

11

Sep-

11

Oct

-11

Nov

-11

Dec

-11

Jan-

12

Feb-

12

Mar

-12

Apr-

12

May

-12

Total Legion Use by Biological Sciences

Total # CPU Hours Used

Total % CPU Hours Used

Linear (Total % CPU Hours Used)

Consortia included:- Bioinformatics and Computational Biology- Next Generation Sequencing Consortia- Epidemiology- Neuroscience

Research Computing and Facilitating Services and CLMS• Three computational platforms:

– Legion HPC service 5680 cores, filesystem currently being refreshed and expanded

– Unity SMP service– Condor high-throughput service– Research Computing Linux service for teaching and learning

• Support, outreach and consultative services – Expand Research Computing training programme– Formal outreach and engagement programme

• Scientific Software Development services:– Training in common programming languages and best practise– Scientific software development services (resource)– Central code development environment

Centre for Innovation (CfI)

Overview• First project for e-Infrastructure South Consortium

– Oxford, UCL, Southampton, Bristol

• £2.82 million Capital for two HPC facilities– General purpose cluster based at Southampton (4,000 cores rising to 12,000 in 2013)– GPGPU system at RAL (4th largest in Europe at service start – 114 TFlops)

• £701K recurrent (1 year only)

Current Status:• Tiered governance structure• Tactical approach early usage • Q1 ‘Pilot’ Users being nominated by Deans

http://www.einfrastructuresouth.ac.uk/cfi/the-centre-for-innovation

“To support multi-disciplinary research, with a centre of gravity in engineering and physical sciences, reaching out to other disciplines”

“To encourage and enable industrial usage and collaboration”

GovernanceCLMS representation at all levels of Research IT Services Governancehttp://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/staff/research_services/governance

Further InformationResearch Computing homepage:www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/staff/research_services/research-computingResearch IT Services homepage:www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/staff/research_servicesContact: Clare Gryce c.gryce@ucl.ac.uk