University of Michigan researchers and IT staff wrapped up a successful Supercomputing ‘18 (SC18) in Dallas from Nov. 11-16, 2018, taking part in a number of different aspects of the conference.
SC “Perennial” Quentin Stout, U-M professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and one of only 19 people who have been to every Supercomputing conference, co-presented a tutorial titled Parallel Computing 101.
And with the recent announcement of a new HPC cluster on campus called Great Lakes, IT staff from Advanced Research Computing – Technology Services (ARC-TS) made presentations around the conference on the details of the new supercomputer.
U-M once again shared a booth with Michigan State University booth, highlighting our computational and data-intensive research as well as the comprehensive set of tools and services we provide to our researchers. Representatives from all ARC units were at the booth: ARC-TS, the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS), the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering (MICDE), and Consulting for Statistics, Computing and Analytics Research (CSCAR).
The booth also featured two demonstrations: one on the Open Storage Research Infrastructure or OSiRIS, the multi-institutional software-defined data storage system, and the Services Layer At The Edge (SLATE) project, both of which are supported by the NSF; the other tested conference-goers’ ability to detect “fake news” stories compared to an artificial intelligence system created by researchers supported by MIDAS.
U-M Activities
- Tutorial: Parallel Computing 101: Prof. Stout and Associate Professor Christiane Jablonowski of the U-M Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering provided a comprehensive overview of parallel computing.
- Introduction to Kubernetes. Presented by Bob Killen, Research Cloud Administrator, and Scott Paschke, Research Cloud Solutions Designer, both from ARC-TS. Containers have shifted the way applications are packaged and delivered. Their use in data science and machine learning is skyrocketing with the beneficial side effect of enabling reproducible research. This rise in use has necessitated the need to explore and adopt better container-centric orchestration tools. Of these tools, Kubernetes – an open-source container platform born within Google — has become the de facto standard. This half-day tutorial introduced researchers and sys admins who may already be familiar with container concepts to the architecture and fundamental concepts of Kubernetes. Attendees explored these concepts through a series of hands-on exercises and left with the leg-up in continuing their container education, and gained a better understanding of how Kubernetes may be used for research applications.
- Brock Palen, Director of ARC-TS, spoke about the new Great Lakes HPC cluster:
- DDN booth (3123)
- Mellanox booth (3207)
- Dell booth (3218)
- SLURM booth (1242)
- Todd Raeker, Research Technology Consultant for ARC-TS, went to the Globus booth (4201) to talk about U-M researchers’ use of the service.
- Birds of a Feather: Meeting HPC Container Challenges as a Community. Bob Killen, Research Cloud Administrator at ARC-TS, gave a lightning talk as part of this session that presented, prioritized, and gathered input on top issues and budding solutions around containerization of HPC applications.
- Sharon Broude Geva, Director of ARC, was live on the SC18 News Desk discussing ARC HPC services, Women in HPC, and the Coalition for Scientific Academic Computation (CASC). The stream was available from the Supercomputing Twitter account: https://twitter.com/Supercomputing
- Birds of a Feather: Ceph Applications in HPC Environments: Ben Meekhof, HPC Storage Administrator at ARC-TS, gave a lightning talk on Ceph and OSiRIS as part of this session. More details at https://www.msi.umn.edu/ceph-hpc-environments-sc18
- ARC was a sponsor of the Women in HPC Reception. See the event description for more details and to register. Sharon Broude Geva, Director of ARC, gave a presentation.
- Birds of a Feather: Cloud Infrastructure Solutions to Run HPC Workloads: Bob Killen, Research Cloud Administrator at ARC-TS, presented at this session aimed at architects, administrators, software engineers, and scientists interested in designing and deploying cloud infrastructure solutions such as OpenStack, Docker, Charliecloud, Singularity, Kubernetes, and Mesos.
- Jing Liu of the Michigan Institute for Data Science, participated in a panel discussion at the Purdue University booth.
Follow ARC on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ARC_UM for updates.