The University of Western Australia gets new HPC
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Oct. 10, 2011
The University of Western Australia just acquired a new high powered computer (HPC) and it's quite a beast,
we must tell you.
Each of its 96 nodes has two six-core Intel Xeon X5650 processors, one NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU, and 48 GB of memory,
but the SGI Fornax supercomputer opened late September as part of Western Australia’s Pawsey Center project is still
a pilot project, however.
The university's demands of big science are so intensive, and the data sets so diverse across different communities,
that even a finished project is also a development platform for new techniques and applications.
Located at the University of Western Australia, the iVEC@UWA HPC is being managed and operated by iVEC, and is
the second system in the Pawsey project. The Pawsey Centre would ultimately operate the supercomputing facilities
that will be built if Australia’s bid for the Square Kilometer Array astronomy project is successful.
While astronomy is the big national attention-grabber, the Pawsey Centre systems architect Guy Robinson is at
pains to emphasise that the Fornax supercomputer will carry workloads for a host of different scientific ventures,
including geosciences, biosciences, materials science, chemistry, meteorology and climate science.
Astronomers need to be able to stream data into the centre at very high rates of 40 Gbps coming from each
individual site in a radioastronomy array. That has to be handled without disrupting the other users in the centre.
When the data has been pre-processed and stored, astronomers typically work with 6 TB files. “Geosciences, on the
other hand, may generate 100 TB data sets. So we have to build systems that can make their files available. We need
to create a system with massive disk resources that aren’t I/O-bound, so that users can swap files in and out in a
reasonable time,” said Robinson.
“A 100 TB file takes a little while to move,” Robinson said, “so we’re working with computer sciences to come
up with ways we can do it quickly over the network.”
As those issues are resolved, geosciences could get the chance to turn their data over much more quickly –
something that could open the door to new research techniques.
“One of the reasons for the system’s multiple InfiniBand connections is that we can tune the I/O to meet the
requirements of different user communities or to reconstruct the file systems to suit their needs,” Robinson added.
The first of the dual InfiniBand networks allows each node to access the global 500 TB filesystem, while the second
allows nodes to access the local disks on neighbouring nodes. The system also allows storage traffic and MPI (message
passing interface) traffic to be kept separate.
Part of the issues posed by the huge datasets that Fornax users create is that different researchers will be asking
different questions of the same, or similar, data.
And the field of astronomy provides a very good example of this. “One astronomer might only want to look at a
single radio frequency from a dataset that has thousands. Another might want to look only at one spatial region,
but analyse all the frequencies that are involved individually.
Searching one spatial region for all the frequencies captured by an instrument might involve a million random
accesses of the tape archive – something which, for all the computing and I/O grunt deployed in the server, is still
slow and inefficient.
Nor is it useful to try in creating different subsets of the same data to serve the different ways users might
access that data because that would multiply the storage requirements too much, and “we can’t predict how many user
types might be out there all at the same time,” added Robinson.
It’s emblematic of the way the university hopes to focus on working with computer science departments in Western
Australia’s scientific community to solve issues that might otherwise get in the way of the science – without the
scientists themselves having to divert too much of their own efforts into solving computing problems.
As Robinson noted, the scientist isn’t rewarded for spending six months solving problems of data access issues
that might only get him or her to the real problem they’re trying to solve. They should be able to devote themselves
to the problems in front of them, with the underlying computer facilities as invisible as possible.
“So we’re always looking at how to come up with a system design, to get a set of components on day one so that
we can change the configuration as new requirements emerge,” he added.
Source: The University of Western Australia.
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