Mr. John Zaitseff1, Mr. Luc Betbeder-Matibet1, Professor David Powell2, Mr. Jake Carroll3
1UNSW Sydney, Sydney, Australia, 2Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, 3University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Biography:
Luc Betbeder-Matibet is a nationally recognised subject matter expert in eResearch, University Research Data Management and shared computational infrastructure services for researchers. He has held director-level roles for 15 years in ICT and eResearch. Luc is the Director Research Technology Services at UNSW, a shared services function that he established which is responsible Research Computing and Research Data. He is an Adjunct in UNSW Faculty of Medicine Centre for Big Data and has been a Visiting Scientist with the Visual Analytics Team in CSIRO Data61. Recently Luc has been working with colleagues to count how much Research Data there actually is in Australia.
John Zaitseff is a Research Computing Support Engineer at UNSW Sydney. He provides both wide and deep expertise in all aspects of High Performance and Research Computing to researchers, including analysing computing needs and requirements, providing advice on purchasing and utilisation, training staff and students to use new and existing facilities, and performing software design, programming, debugging and code optimisation using multiple programming languages.
Abstract:
The 2021 NCRIS roadmap highlights that while High Performance Computing (HPC) in Australia is provided by two Tier-1 facilities, access is limited due to strong demand. As a result, some institutions have developed Tier-2 HPC; however, these facilities are not always widely available. In Europe, the EuroHPC Strategy demonstrates clear advantages to networking institutional Tier 2 facilities with Tier 1 HPC and commercial cloud computing offerings. In Japan, Tier 2 facilities have integrated into a national research storage capacity.
Following the success of last year’s BoF, this BoF will again invite key staff from Australia’s Tier 2 facilities to provide a quick update (5min each): how their facility has changed in the last 12 months, their plans going forward, their mix of users and typical workloads, challenges they are facing, and how any of the above differ from last year.
We have strong support from the Tier 1 facilities and HPC leads at Monash, UNSW and UQ to hold this BoF.
A list of common issues, particularly any differences from last year, will be generated from these updates. These will be discussed by a panel invited by the organising group and will involve the wider BoF audience. Supporting users and workloads who are split between the Tier 1 and Tier 2 systems will also be covered. Items discussed will be documented and shared.
The BoF attendees will determine if there is value in continuing a working group of Tier 2 facilities to identify areas of common strategic and technical alignment.