NeSI’s Flexible HPC – A programmable infrastructure for advanced research solutions
Jun Huh1, Blair Bethwaite1 1New Zealand eScience Infrastructure, Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Abstract
Background
In 2021 the New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) procured and integrated a new high-performance community cloud platform called Flexible HPC. This talk will cover some of the motivations and early use-cases for the new platform, alongside a view of the value proposition, key partnerships, and patterns of use.
The evolving eResearch landscape in Aotearoa New Zealand has highlighted needs for diverse solutions. The Flexible HPC platform responds by supporting multiple research sector customer segments and tenancy models, enabling a wider variety of use cases beyond a traditional HPC service offering. This includes contemporary on-demand access to shared services alongside research institution’ or group’ private eResearch platforms with tight institutional integration and joint service delivery.
Actions
Past two years, NeSI has collaborated on a variety of lead projects to co-design and deliver advanced eResearch solutions hosted on Flexible HPC, including support for Māori data sovereignty, enabling tight institutional integration, and uniting devops approaches with research software engineering on research discipline or community specific platforms.
NeSI is taking a deliberate growth approach to evolving Flexible HPC supported by a catalogue of solution blueprints and patterns as new sector needs are identified and opportunities for novel collaboration and co-design arise.
Results
Five early use cases will be examined across three tenancy models to highlight key learnings in this presentation. It is envisaged that NeSI’s FlexiHPC will provide the sector with a programmable platform for collaboration around science data and support a scalable approach to mid-tier HPC with national expertise complementing localised integration.
Biography
Jun Huh is a Product Manager at NeSI. Jun brings his experience from start-up industries into the field of eResearch. He has been involved in genomic data management related projects for the past 2-3 years, to help build a data repository system in partnership with Genomics Aotearoa, and more recently, prototyping for Rakeiora Pathfinder project, which focuses on enabling research while retaining full visibility and control of data to the indigenous communities.