These are the slides for my talk on HPC Midlands at the Hartree Centre's "HPC As A Service for Industry" event at STFC Daresbury Labs in January 2013. For more information on the HPC Midlands project, please see http://hpc-midlands.ac.uk
3. UK e-Infrastructure Programme
• OSI e-Infrastructure Working Group
• RCUK e-Infrastructure Advisory Group
• £158m BIS e-Infrastructure investment
• Tildesley Report: http://goo.gl/VSw4x
• Regional HPC consortia funded via EPSRC
4. UK e-Infrastructure Programme
• OSI e-Infrastructure Working Group
• RCUK e-Infrastructure Advisory Group
• £158m BIS e-Infrastructure investment
• Tildesley Report: http://goo.gl/VSw4x
• Regional HPC consortia funded via EPSRC
• “Eight Great Technologies”, including £189m
for Big Data & Energy Efficient Computing
5. What is HPC Midlands?
• HPC on demand, delivered via JANET
• Consortium of Loughborough University &
University of Leicester
• Managed service delivered by Bull
• ISV support, e.g. ANSYS and CD-adapco
• Funded by EPSRC/BIS e-Infrastructure
initiative (£1m hardware grant + ‘recurrent’)
9. HPC Midlands Applications
Large Eddy Simulation of Crossflow
Vortices on an Infinite Swept Wing
V. I. Mistry
G .J. Page
J. J. McGuirk
42nd AIAA Fluid Dynamics
Conference
DOI: 10.1016/j.paerosci.2011.12.002
11. HPC Midlands Applications
CFD Based Study of Unconventional
Aeroengine Exhaust Systems
T. Coates
G. J. Page
30th AIAA Applied Aerodynamics
Conference
DOI: 10.2514/6.2012-2775
14. HPC Midlands Case Study – E.ON
Key points:
• Steady state, complex geometry,
simple physics.
• Simulations with 24 to 128 cores
• 6 different meshes used from
4.5 to 80 million cells
• Speed-ups from 30 to 145 times
observed vs. in-house system
ANSYS CFX simulation of
leak in gas turbine enclosure
15. HPC Midlands Case Study – E.ON
Normalized Timings for HPC Runs
CPU core time per million cells
180 169.31
Grid 1 4.5M elements 24 cores
160
per 100 iterations (s)
Grid 2 8M elements 48 cores 140
120
Grid 3 15M elements 48 cores 93.18
100 84.81
Grid 4 25M elements 60 cores 80 67.62
Grid 5
60 39.18
45M elements 128 cores 36.81
40
Grid 6 80M elements 128 cores 20
0
Grid 1 … … … … …
“Straightforward to use, secure and fast”
“Biggest advantage is for jobs that:
Have large parameter spaces
Are time dependent
Have complex geometry
Have very complex physics
A combination of the above”
16. Lessons Learned
• Making the connection
• Paperwork
• Software licensing
• IPR, NDA and other TLAs
• Plumbing
• Sneakernet
• Connectivity
• Moonshot
21. Plumbing - Project Moonshot
• JANET(UK) initiative
• Like eduroam, but for any protocol
• Use your existing credentials everywhere
• Securely tunnelled back to home RADIUS server
• Applicable to academia and industry?
• 18 month pilot, kickoff in April
• https://www.ja.net/products-services/janet-
futures/moonshot