Speaker
Description
Jeremy's DRIFT "Visible HPC" training cluster
The "Visible HPC" mini-HPC portable training cluster is a 32+4-node Raspberry Pi 5 cluster developed to support the provision of introductory High Performance Computing training to a range of groups within the research community, from researchers to technical professionals to facilitators and engagement managers. The core motivation for the development of the cluster is that people learning about HPC today very rarely have the opportunity to see actual infrastructure. The days when people could tour on-site machine rooms at universities and see real HPC clusters in action are rapidly disappearing as HPC resources are increasingly housed off-site, in purpose-built data centres, or compute capacity is bought in from cloud providers. This can have significant cost and efficiency benefits but, for learners sitting in front of a terminal window on their laptop undertaking HPC training or using HPC resources, it’s very difficult to really understand what’s at the other end of the network connection!
This challenge started our “Visible HPC” activity that is being taken forward through a range of UKRI-funded projects. The cluster being brought to this workshop is our initial prototype portable training cluster that has been funded through the UKRI DRI-funded DRIFT project. We are developing a range of introductory training material alongside the cluster and have developed it to offer a number of properties that enable us to demonstrate key aspects of real data centres, just on a much smaller, and rather simplified, scale!
We hope that our “Visible HPC” cluster will help to make key aspects of now largely invisible HPC infrastructure visible again. We also hope it will inspire (and train) a new generation of potential HPC experts, engaging them in the same way that many of today’s HPC practitioners were engaged by visits to university machine rooms and the chance for hands-on experimentation with computer hardware.
- Developing small exercises with associated computational examples that can be run on the cluster, which can be included within the material.
- Helping to develop episode content that describes the cluster hardware and relates it to large-scale infrastructure that might be found in a data centre.
- Developing a guest access registration web app for this and similar small, portable HPC clusters.
