PACE is a campus-wide, high performance computing cluster effort facilitated through the Office of Information Technology (OIT.) The focus of PACE is two-fold: 1) a hosting environment for privately owned clusters and 2) a community cluster environment for institute-owned and privately-owned nodes and file services.

PACE Hosting Environment

Computing clusters, while generally cheaper up front than traditional HPC systems, will begin to require significant care and feeding once they reach a certain size. For example, the higher speed commodity PCs can generate quite a heat load and require significant amounts of conditioned power for stability. Depending on your situation, as you grow your system you may find that you need some help in determining just where to house your system.

OIT has been able to provide significant assistance in this area. That is, we can assist owners of privately held clusters with the location of conditioned space, the general monitoring of system health by our 24 x 7 operation staff, site licensed Linux and compiler distributions, access to a secure environment with programmable card key access, and a high capacity campus fiber plant for dedicated fiber connectivity to faculty offices and labs as well as remote access for management and file backups.

PACE Community Cluster

The central resource is a commodity computing cluster formed from joint institute and faculty collaboration and funding. Through PACE's provision of conditioned space and common services (primarily networking, software licenses, system administration, file backup), faculty are freed of the obligations and concerns of building their own clusters and are provided with a more up-to-date, stable, and secure facility. The institute on the whole is able to take advantage of market opportunities and economies of scale through PACE. Staffing and funds can be leveraged across the broader base.

As sponsoring agencies move away from long term research support toward near term products, they are also concentrating significant funds on terascale systems to support a smaller number of research teams working in certain project areas. This means that organizations and their states must step up to fill the gaps left by this change in funding approaches. PACE is a strategy toward filling these gaps.

What is the purpose of the PACE Community Cluster?

The PACE Community Cluster provides computing cycles for applications that require HPC resources such as parallel processing, large memory, and long running times. By structuring the PACE Community Cluster in a way that encourages faculty to collaborate and contribute resources, we provide them with the ability to run larger applications, which strengthens their competitive standing for acquiring grants and more resources. The PACE Community Cluster is a campus facility shared by faculty and students, as they need it, and scheduled in a manner equitable with their contribution. Central or surplus cycles can be made available to those investigating the development of cluster applications, teaching and learning (computational science classes), and the remaining (but significant) large serial applications.

Another key area to which PACE directs its attention is to reduce duplication of system administration effort and commonly purchased equipment. However, PACE also offers assistance to faculty in terms of purchasing recommendations for HPC equipment and vendor negotiations or simply environmental concerns such as space, electrical power and air conditioning.

Who is the target audience?

PACE is directed at faculty and students who:

• want to join forces and contribute resources to build a bigger cluster for all.
• want to investigate the use of cluster computers.
• cannot justify funding for full time system administration.
• need cluster resources for their classroom/curriculum.
• must have facilities for running large serial applications.
• need assistance in determining the type of HPC system that meets their requirements.
• need assistance in working with vendors to acquire HPC equipment.