On 10/21/2010 11:19 AM, Bill Rankin wrote: [...]
In order to make it work, you really need the senior leadership of the university to commit to making central HPC infrastructure an absolute requirement, and sticking to that commitment when it comes budget time and the politics are running hot and heavy over who gets how much.
Agreed. These battles can be fierce. And if you add in a decidedly non-HPC IT organization as a player, HPC can take some different directions. Especially on some of the baseline infrastructure decisions.
Now to most of us this is a rehash of a conversation that we have had often before. And with clusters and HPC pretty much established as a necessity for any major research university, the development of central facilities would seem to be the obvious solution. I find it somewhat concerning that institutions like Harvard are apparently still dealing with this issue.
Its a long list of major research institutions, which have a less powerful admin and more powerful departments. These don't even tend to be a federated set of clusters (or clouds). More like clusters/HPC in isolation.
Its a good idea to share the need/costs/benefits among many departments ... lowers costs, increases utility, etc. The issue is, as Bill noted, come budget time, when the long knives are out, whether or not HPC survives intact, or is carved up and allocated in a less than (nearly) optimal manner.
Maybe HPC needs to be its own department, then it can fight for its own budgets. Have a supercomputing institute (ala MSI at U Minnesota) provide leadership, infrastructure, space, resources. Its a model that could work at different scales for other universities.
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