Reestablishing the Tier 2 HPC community at eResearch

Reestablishing the Tier 2 HPC community at eResearch

John Zaitseff¹, Luc Betbeder-Matibet¹, Slava Kitaeff², Jake Carroll³, Stephen Giugni<sup>4

1</sup>UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
²Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia
³The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
⁴The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

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.

This BoF will invite key staff from Australia’s Tier 2 facilities to provide a quick update (5min each): how their facility has changed in the last 12-24 months, their plans going forward, their mix of users and typical workloads, and the challenges they are currently facing.

We have strong support from the Tier 1 facilities and the HPC leads at Melbourne, Monash, UNSW and UQ to hold this BoF at eResearch 2023.

A list of common issues 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. A focused discussion, led by the panel, on the topic of supporting users and workloads who are split between the Tier 1 and Tier 2 systems will also be covered. The items discussed will be documented and shared.

The BoF attendees will then determine if there is value in forming a working group of Tier 2 facilities to identify areas of common strategic and technical alignment.

Biography

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.