The document discusses the HPC Forum, which aims to facilitate technical collaboration among HPC administrators. It proposes gathering HPC administrators quarterly to present on hardware and software technologies. Currently, most HPC administrator knowledge is shared informally through mailing lists and blogs. The HPC Forum plans to start holding seminars and maintain a wiki to better enable knowledge sharing. It could also work to increase academic interest in HPC administration by developing teaching materials and providing a space for learning and experimentation.

1. HPC Forum
a space for technical collaboration amongst HPC administrators
Peter van Heusden
pvh@sanbi.ac.za
South African National Bioinformatics Institute
University of the Western Cape
Bellville, South Africa
CHPC National Meeting / 5 December 2013
Peter van Heusden pvh@sanbi.ac.za
HPC Forum

2. How to become a HPC admin
Peter van Heusden pvh@sanbi.ac.za
HPC Forum

3. A simple idea
Find all the HPC admins
Gather once a quarter
Present on technology (hardware/software) we’ve been working
with
Peter van Heusden pvh@sanbi.ac.za
HPC Forum

4. One, two, many HPCs
Before 1990, HPC meant hugely expensive computers built on
national or regional scale
Institute-level computing in 1990s was dominated by individual
SMP machines
Mid-to-late 90s saw birth of the commodity cluster (Beowulf)
Peter van Heusden pvh@sanbi.ac.za
HPC Forum

5. The world we work in
Peter van Heusden pvh@sanbi.ac.za
HPC Forum

6. One, two, many HPCs (cont)
Now: HPC everywhere, but skills hard to find
The few courses that exist focus on HPC programming (parallel
applications, MPI, etc)
HPC exists alongside “cyberinfrastructure” and “cloud”: different
environments but all based on complex and often poorly
documented software
“with limited resources and expertise, even simple data
discovery, collection, analysis, management, and sharing
tasks are difficult for small teams” (Ian Foster, Computation
Institute)
Peter van Heusden pvh@sanbi.ac.za
HPC Forum

7. How to become a (better) HPC admin
Most HPC admin knowledge is passed on peer-to-peer
Admins rely on the “social media” of HPC: Mailing lists, technical
blogs, IRC
Networking happens sporadically
- HPC admins don’t get out much
Peter van Heusden pvh@sanbi.ac.za
HPC Forum

8. The HPC Forum plan
First face to face seminar day: mid-February 2013
Minimal wiki: http://hpcforum.sanbi.ac.za
Will soon move to http://hpcforum.org.za
Grow (mailing list) membership
Keep producing (and linking to) tech blogs
Peter van Heusden pvh@sanbi.ac.za
HPC Forum

9. HPC research and teaching
HPC admin has historically been seen as an operations issue
Academic interest has been limited and curricula non-existent
HPC Forum could:
Collect and curate teaching materials on HPC admin
Provide space for learning and experimentation in HPC
Increase the profile of HPC as an area of research and learning
Create a collective experimental community for HPC technology
Contribute “infrastructure code” to a shared repository (e.g.
SAGridOps on Github)
Peter van Heusden pvh@sanbi.ac.za
HPC Forum

10. Related initiatives
Africa-Arabia Regional Operations Centre
SADC HPC Forum : human capital development in HPC
Peter van Heusden pvh@sanbi.ac.za
HPC Forum

11. Over to you.