{"id":145,"date":"2016-07-01T11:31:07","date_gmt":"2016-07-01T01:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/unsw-it\/?p=145"},"modified":"2016-07-01T12:57:44","modified_gmt":"2016-07-01T02:57:44","slug":"on-demand-high-performance-computing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/unsw-it\/blog\/2016\/07\/on-demand-high-performance-computing\/","title":{"rendered":"On Demand High Performance Computing"},"content":{"rendered":"

UNSW IT has been working with our research community to determine the viability of a\u00a0High Performance Compute On Demand<\/a>\u00a0service. The service could potentially\u00a0allow researchers across UNSW to ‘spin up’ high end computing clusters for research purposes.\u00a0Put simply, HPC on Demand\u00a0is a shopping cart style portal that guides researchers through a series of simple questions to automatically provision the compute, storage and software required for their need.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"istock_000025761478_narrow_0\"The service, still in beta, was created in conjunction with the UNSW research community, with researchers from many\u00a0faculties contributing to the project.\u00a0The questions are designed to be nontechnical, with an emphasis on “what would you like to achieve?”, not “how many cores do you need?” – to ensure HPC on Demand will be easy to use.<\/p>\n

Matt Scolari,\u00a0Director of\u00a0IT Solution Delivery at UNSW, is excited to get\u00a0the service in the hands of researchers.\u00a0“It’s got all the software you need, all the compute and storage you need, it’s using world’s best security, with all costs estimated up front.” But it’s not just the technical achievements Matt\u00a0is\u00a0excited by, he believes the new service could\u00a0simplify the grants application process for researchers<\/p>\n

\"image1\"“After a series of demos and co-design sessions with some researchers it was quickly identified that this portal has another fantastic opportunity for researchers ” Matt\u00a0said. “We found\u00a0researchers were able to use the self service checkout, and in just a few minutes, end up with an estimate they could use in their grant application. This has the potential to make grant applications much easier for all researchers, particularly those applying for\u00a0micro grants. The portal provides researchers with the ability to email an estimate after they have identified their need and that estimate can be used to inform and help the grant submission.”<\/p>\n

The potential savings of\u00a0HPC on Demand are impressive. “Traditionally, a researcher\u00a0going for a grant would need to buy all the computing equipment outright, even if they know the research may only take a year or less to complete. They would buy\u00a0compute and storage for the grant, so for instance, they might include five $30K research workstations into that grant. So a one year grant has an immediate, up front cost of\u00a0$150k. With On Demand HPC, they’re only buying the computing power they need for the time they need, so a comparable service could be as low as $40k over twelve months, depending on usage. And we’d be able to estimate all of that up front.”<\/p>\n

Matt\u00a0and his team are\u00a0working hard to ensure\u00a0HPC on Demand will cover just about every use case a UNSW research might need. “We have partnered with a research organisation that supplies over 600 prebuilt or scripted software, tools and utilities that researchers use across many disciplines. This list is added to on a daily basis and we have access to tap into this catalogue.”<\/p>\n

For more information, contact the team at\u00a0UNSWHPCondemand@unsw.edu.au<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UNSW IT has been working with our research community to determine the viability of a\u00a0High Performance Compute On Demand\u00a0service. The service could potentially\u00a0allow researchers across UNSW to ‘spin up’ high end computing clusters for research purposes.\u00a0Put simply, HPC on Demand\u00a0is a shopping cart style portal that guides researchers through a series of simple questions to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":87034,"featured_media":155,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39892],"tags":[39636,6154,39374],"class_list":["post-145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-services","tag-beta","tag-computing","tag-hpc"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/unsw-it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/unsw-it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/unsw-it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/unsw-it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/87034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/unsw-it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/unsw-it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":179,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/unsw-it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions\/179"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/unsw-it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/unsw-it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/unsw-it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/unsw-it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}