Campus Grids Special Interest Group Meeting

Theme 1: Campus Grids in the e-Infrastructure

It will be discussed how Campus resources fit with the wider UK e-Infrastructure. In particular capacity vs. capability computing will be considered, how Tier-3 feeds up into Tier-2 and Tier-1 (and vice versa) and how to avoid Tier-2 provision under-mining business cases for local services.

From the DBIS press release of 1/12/2011, the proposed capital spend was:

•     £30 million for the Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus, supporting research into the latest product development software. This facility is now known as ICE-CSE;
•     £24 million for high capacity data storage across the Research Councils, ensuring researchers can easily access complex information from experiments;
•     £31 million to improve high capacity networks, including JANET, the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s system that helps the higher education community share large amounts of research data more easily;
•     £19 million for specialist supercomputers in areas such as particle physics and astronomy, weather forecasting and climate change, and genome analysis;
•     £4.75 million for the UK Space Agency to support the collection and storage of data from satellites; and
•     £6.5 million to establish a research fund for collaborative university projects to improve access to e-infrastructure.

The latter became the £8M e-Infrastructure Connectivity Call from EPSRC and coined the term “Tier-2” for shared resources in regional centres of excellence.

Definition of Tiers:

• Tier-0: Europe wide with users from multiple countries, e.g. through PRACE. The UK currently does not have such an HPC machine. HECToR was suggested, but EPSRC were not able to commit the required resources. Tier-0 for the particle physics community is the HPC Data Centre at CERN.
• Tier-1: For HPC users this is HECToR, and may shortly also includes the ICE-CSE facility at Daresbury. For particle physics users it is the LHC Tier-1 Centre at RAL.
• Tier-2: with the funding of regional centres for the e-Infrastructure this tier can be defined to be a resource shared by a number of participating institutions. It may be interesting to see how this fits with future plans for the NGS and if there are any lessons to be learned.
• Tier-3: is therefore considered to be the main institutional computing service, either for HPC users, data storage, particle physics or a combination of these. We could propose that it include all resources on a campus. It is the focus of the HPC-SIG and CG-SIG.

Theme 2: Continued Investment in Condor Pools

There was an e-mail discussion on the Campus SIG mailing list last December about making the case for continued investment in campus Condor pools. Questions suggested were:

• How large is your pool?
• How much is it used?
• What profile of research does it support?
• How does it fit alongside your other compute services?
• What are the recognised benefits to your institution, of having the service?

To attend this meeting please see the event page.