Compute Canada Intro. Dugan O'Neil CSDH AGM May 28,

Transcription

1 Compute Canada Intro Dugan O'Neil CSDH AGM May 28,

2 Who/what is Compute Canada? A national organization providing Advanced Research Computing. Mandated to support all research disciplines at a variety of scales (not only traditional HPC ). Not just providers of cycles : Expertise to exploit infrastructure for research Infrastructure: Compute, storage, databases, portals, etc. Partner to international organizations Key training role in techniques/technologies We provide a set of services to the research community (free of charge). 2

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4 Resources: People 150+ staff at 30+ institutions across Canada. More than 60 PhDs (eg. former students/postdocs in research groups). Strong desire to learn/adapt to new disciplines/technologies. Willingness to work with researchers at all stages. Tremendous pool of advanced computing expertise -> Compute Canada's greatest asset! 4

5 Resources and Allocation Many compute (200k cores), storage (20+PB) systems across Canada. Systems with differing capabilities (eg. single system with 16TB RAM). Any Canadian university researcher can get an account. Systems have default allocations which do not require any special justification/proposal. Groups that require resources beyond default apply through annual resource allocation process. Scientific and technical evaluations. 5

6 Interface to the Resources Original model for usage driven by traditional HPC community: login shell and batch scheduler. Other types of usage also supported, but more ad-hoc (project-by-project). Examples: clouds, gateways, DBs, portals, grids. Current systems built as a result of the National Platforms proposal in Two OpenStack cloud systems being purchased+deployed now with last remaining NPF money. 6

7 Who do we support today? 7

8 CC and the Digital Humanities CC goal: do a better job of supporting/enabling DH research. We are supporting DH researchers now. Several nice success stories. Until now, no national strategy. No sharing of best practices across Canada, no dedicated personnel. We have started to change this. Input welcome! 8

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10 Existing DH Initiatives We have sponsored training workshops and conferences. Individual researchers have requested resources and support and we help however we can (eg. letters of support, analyst time, infrastructure allocation). We ran a special resource allocation call in 2012 for humanities and social sciences: special dedicated system (Fortier) available plus normal resources 3 projects supported 10

11 How can we do better? 11

12 Acquire Expertise We should train our existing staff in DH techniques: 5 staff attending DHSI 2014 as students. We should target new hires in this area: A new position has been approved. Winding its way through university HR now. Explicit requirement: graduate training in DH. We should attend events like this one, and INKE gatherings to better understand what we can do to help. 12

13 DH Support Team Create a team of analysts among our 150. Standing group of people enthusiastic about learning/supporting this area. Members from all regions. Build long-term, ongoing knowledge in this area inside our organization. Learn to speak the language of DH. New DH hire expected to take leadership role in the national team. team-dh@computecanada.ca 13

14 Enabling Technologies: Storage Our 20+PB of storage has been accessible only in a traditional HPC way. Two new initiatives: OwnCloud (dropbox for researchers) GlobusOnline (big data movement, including between CC sites) OwnCloud is available now please use! GlobusOnline beta available next month, full roll-out later this year. 14

15 Enabling Technologies: Storage 15

16 Enabling Technologies: Storage 16

17 Enabling Technologies: Cloud Two significant cloud systems (100s of cores each, significant storage) have been purchased. To be deployed this summer. OpenStack will be deployed. Looking for customers with non-hpc needs! 17

18 Brainstorm: Your Idea Here A portal allocation competition? More targeted DH resources allocations? Are there other things that have worked at a local level which you wish you could scale-up? 18

19 What is to come? CFI has put out a consultation document for the Cyberinfrastructure Competition. First major competition of this type since 2006 NPF. CFI consultations coming to a city near you soon (your VPR/RSO knows about it). Compute Canada platform renewal + thematic competition (data-intensive). Calls proposed to be issued this fall. At least $50M in CFI funds available. 19

20 We need to plan! - SPARC Compute Canada to build and operate the gear and support the researchers for both platform renewal and thematic competition. We need a Sustainable Plan for Advanced Research Computing. Kickstart with Cyberinfrastructure planning this year. Need input from disciplines, institutions, organizations, etc.: disciplinary whitepapers (CSDH?) institutional strategic plans analysis of current usage patterns direct researcher feedback (surveys, consultation@computecanada.ca) 20

21 Conclusions Compute Canada is here to serve. We can provide expertise, access to hardware, etc. As an organization, we are ramping up our DH efforts. Your input is welcome. CFI cyberinfrastructure call is coming. We need to know what you need! SPARC: We would like to work with you to aggregate the needs of this community ( ). Let us know if we can help facilitate in any way. 21

22 Example from SHARCNET "This month we feature the work of Bruce Robertson, Head of Classics at Mount Allison University. Robertson was a recipient of a resource allocation through a special CC call for proposals from the Humanities and Social Sciences. Robertson is an ancient historian whose area of specialty is Classical Athens, particularly its social history. His traditional research deals with societies developed 3,000 years ago and his web initiative aims to transform the way that people world-wide see and understand their past. Through the use of SHARCNET s Fortier system, along with HPC support to help port his code, Robertson s results comprise ~600 volumes of polytonic Greek from archive.org OCR'd to a high standard. These will form the basis of a free and open library of ancient Greek authors and public domain scholarship. The results can be viewed and freely downloaded here. This work is of both practical and theoretical interest and is becoming the basis of projects around the world including: the Digital Philology group at Leipzig, the Classics Department at Dickinson College (US), and members of the Society for Biblical Literature. Operational details of this project have gained international attention and were presented at the 2013 Digital Classicist seminar at the University of London this past summer." 22