HPCwire: Making Big Iron Fit the User at NCSA

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October 06, 2006

Making Big Iron Fit the User at NCSA

by J. William Bell

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Tailored allocation management on NCSA's Tungsten cluster proves an important part of many researchers' workflows.

Once the allocations have been made and the highest-quality projects have been given set amounts of time, there are two straightforward ways of scheduling users on a supercomputer. One is egalitarian. A queuing system applies a set of rules -- based on the amount of time a particular job is going to take, how many processors are going to be used, and the like -- and puts people in line to wait their turn. The other is totalitarian. The decks are cleared for a big user, and he or she runs on a massive number of processors, perhaps the whole machine, for a long time.

Neither approach is ideal, and neither addresses more nuanced or immediate needs.

Take the case of the MILC collaboration, which studies quantum chromodynamics. In 2004, they received an allocation of four million CPU hours on NCSA's Tungsten cluster. By any reckoning, even one that comprises researchers at nine institutions, that's a massive allocation of time.

To use those resources sensibly and efficiently requires human decisions and policies that are well tuned to the various ways that researchers use the center's systems.

"Sitting down, going to talk to the users, and figuring out what they want. It's the only way to do this" when you have a broad variety of user needs, according to John Towns, who leads NCSA's Persistent Infrastructure Directorate. "'This doesn't work for me' is the last thing you want to hear."

A powerful machine is still important, and Tungsten is certainly that. It has a peak capability of more than 15 trillion calculations per second, making it the largest computer supported by the National Science Foundation and available for open scientific research.

A popular machine is also important, and Tungsten is that, too. In September 2005, about 162 million normalized units of computing time were allocated on Tungsten -- about 20 percent of the total parceled out by NSF across the nation. User requests for Tungsten were almost double that number, far exceeding the number available. This made Tungsten the most requested and the most allocated system in NSF's arsenal in September.

"If you allocate this large and popular a resource in the traditional ways, somebody always suffers. People with large runs wait a long time in the queues or don't get to run at all because the queuing system is set up to handle a large number of smaller jobs. Or the smaller jobs get brushed aside in order to dedicate the machine to large jobs. It's a tough balance to strike," Towns says.

"Tungsten is a resource that satisfies specific needs of the user community. It's a critical part of their research workflow," NCSA Director Thom Dunning says. "That means we have to tailor allocations to suit them. We planned for this sort of approach when we installed Tungsten, and the popularity and productivity among users really showed us that it was the right way to go."

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