In this presentation from the Dell booth at SC13, Dr Paul Calleja from the University of Cambridge describes how they are using HPC Virtualization to meet user needs. Watch the video presentation: http://insidehpc.com/2013/12/05/panel-discussion-thought-hpc-virtualization-never-going-happen/

1. Drivers for Virtualization
in Research Computing
Dr Paul Calleja
Director HPC Service, University of Cambridge
Dell SC 2013

2. What do we do ?
HPC service
provision
&
Grant funded
HPC research
Cambridge
HPC
Service
Dell HPC
Solution
Centre
Commercial
HPC as a
service
Promote uptake of HPC by industry
Dell SC 2013
HPC
Centre of
excellence

3. The University and surrounding technology hub
• The University of Cambridge is a world leading teaching & research
institution, consistently ranked within the top 3 Universities world wide
• Annual income of £1200M - 40% is research related - one of the largest
R&D budgets within the UK HE sector
• 17000 students, 9,000 staff
• Cambridge is a major technology centre
– 1535 technology companies in surrounding science parks
– £12B annual revenue
– 53000 staff
• HPC is recognised as an important enabling technology for University
research and the wider Cambridge technology community • We are tasked with providing HPC services to the University and
surrounding technology companies
Dell SC 2013

4. Our business model
• The HPCS is run as a charge at point of use cost centre
• We receive no central funding from the University
• We pay for all costs, staff, power, data centre operations, university
services ie HR, accountancy, legal, coffee…….
• The only subsidy we enjoy is capital cost of machine room infrastructure
• We charge our internal and external customers for services under
contract to recover costs, Internal use at cost, external use under a
margin to subsidise internal access.
• We started this model 7 years ago with a one off capital injection of £2M and
6 month’s of oppex !!
• We are now fully self sustaining having increased our capital turnover by
factor 2 and our operational turnover by factor 4
Dell SC 2013

5. Research Computing Services
• We provide access to large scale central shared HPC & data storage
systems
• We provides a full range of consultancy services on the design, procurement
implementation and support of 3rd party (customer) owned research
computing infrastructure.
• Hosting service for 3rd party research computing infrastructure as a
managed service
• Traditional strengths in large scale HPC & visualisation
• Emerging push into data analytics platforms and methods and remote
visualisation, virtualised platforms
Dell SC 2013

6. Cambridge HPC facts
• 700 registered users from 30 departments
• 36 external industrial engagement over last 18 months
• 856 Dell Servers - 450 TF sustained DP performance
• 600 node (9600 core) full non blocking Mellanox FDR IB 2,6 GHz sandy bridge (185 TF) –
fastest Intel cluster in UK (when installed) – entered at 93 in TOP500
• 128 node 256 card NVIDIA K20 GPU cluster 250 TF full non blocking dual rail Mellanox FDR
connect IB - fastest GPU cluster in UK install date October -2013
• 128 node Westmere (1536 cores) (15 TF)
• 2.5 PB storage –high performance parallel file system 30GB/s
Dell SC 2013

7. Drivers for virtualization
• Because of our business model we need to :• Increase accessibility to HPC and data analytics platform
• Increase customers productivity
• Provide secure multi-tenant solutions
• The key drivers for adoption and development of virtualisation technologies
within RC is that it helps with these issues by providing :• More flexible access to remote compute recourses
• Customised environments
• Sandboxing of the user environment protecting them from others and
others from them i.e. more secure multi-tenancy
• Allows users to take advantage of wider 3rd party cloud infrastructure
• Dynamic environment for throughput of workload. Ability to checkpoint
out low priority workload for increased throughput of higher SLA work
• Moves the HPC / data analytics system stack out of an HPC niche and
into more mainstream enterprise computing domain
Dell SC 2013

8. Three virtualization use cases
• Remote visualisation / Virtual workstation via 3D accelerated virtual remote
sessions
• Recent advanced from NVIDIA and virtualisation technologies from
VMware and Critix allow remote 3D accelerated remote access to the
virtual machine
• Virtualise HPC platform for large scale simulation and throughput work loads
• Virtualised data analytics platform – allows data analytics as a service, bring
the users to the data not the data to the users
Dell SC 2013