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www.deisa.eu

User Support in DEISA/PRACE

EEF meeting

2 November 2010, Geneva

Jules Wolfrat/Axel Berg

SARA

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Outline

• User communities• Application enabling• User services• User support

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DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative(DECI)

• DECI launched in early 2005 for complex, demanding, innovative simulations requiring the exceptional capabilities of DEISA

• Multi-national proposals especially encouraged

• Proposals reviewed by national evaluation committees

• Most appropriate supercomputer architecture selected for each project (IBM BlueGene, IBM Power6, CRAY XT, Intel based (Nehalem), NEC SX)

• Computing time granted in combination with enabling support (3-9 PM’s per project)

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DECI call 200551 proposals, 12 European countries involved, co-investigator from US)30 mio cpu-h requested29 proposals accepted, 12 mio cpu-h awarded (normalized to IBM P4+)

DECI call 200641 proposals, 12 European countries involvedco-investigators from N + S America, Asia (US, CA, AR, ISRAEL)28 mio cpu-h requested 23 proposals accepted, 12 mio cpu-h awarded (normalized to IBM P4+)

DECI call 200763 proposals, 14 European countries involved, co-investigators from

N + S America, Asia, Australia (US, CA, BR, AR, ISRAEL, AUS)70 mio cpu-h requested45 proposals accepted, ~30 mio cpu-h awarded (normalized to IBM P4+)

DECI call 2008 66 proposals, 15 European countries involved, co-investigators from N + S America, Asia, Australia134 mio cpu-h requested (42 proposals accepted, 48 mio cpu-h awarded (normalized to IBM P4+)

DECI call 200975 proposals, 19 European countries involved, co-investigators from US, China, Japan, Israel220 mio cpu-h requested (normalized to IBM P4+)50 proposals accepted, 60 mio cpu-h awarded (normalized to IBM P4+)

DECI call 2010122 proposals, 24 European countries involved, co-investigators from N-America, Asia540 mio cpu-h requested (normalized to IBM P4+)

DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative

user support

DECI-1 (2005)DECI-2 (2006)

DECI-3 (2007)DECI-4 (2008)

DECI-5 (2009)DECI-6 (2010)

Requested (median)

Requested (average)

0

500,000

1,000,000

1,500,000

2,000,000

2,500,000

3,000,000

3,500,000

4,000,000

4,500,000

5,000,000

Requested (median)

Requested (average)

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Virtual communities

• “A virtual scientific community is a group of people, often researchers and students, who share multiple resources related to the scientific field and whose main medium of communication is the internet” – Wikipedia

• DEISA has no definition of a virtual community but seeks to offer an alternative access mechanism for larger, loosely or closely coupled European research consortia to access DEISA facilities for a longer period of time than a DECI project can guarantee

• The Virtual Community is given an allocation of DEISA resources

• Responsibility for the allocation of resources amongst the members of the community is delegated to the community

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Virtual Communities

EFDA

EUFORIA (Fusion Research)

ENES (Climate Research)

LFI-PLANCK

VIRGO (Astrophysics)

VPH

VIROLAB (Life Sciences)

user support

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PRACE

• PRACE services started by July 1st 2010

• Calls for project proposals with a centrally managed European peer review procedure

• Virtual Community support also planned

• Model for user support is currently being setup, following DEISA experiences

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“Applications Enabling”

Objectives

“... enhance the scientific applications to adequately cope with a production infrastructure characterized by an aggressive parallelism on heterogeneous architectures at European scale. Applications come from the DECI, Virtual Communities and EU projects.”

“Enhancing Scalability”

Objectives

“... to support enabling effort by enhancing the scalability of the scientific applications”

Work is done as a joint research with PI and partners

Application support

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Target applications are mainly selected from

DECI: WP7 connection

Virtual Communities: strong European communities of researchers

Others: European Projects

Applications are categorized by the kind of enabling effort required and the target architectures

Once Home and Exec sites are assigned, enabling effort is assessed with the PI’s

Workpackage resources are allocated and enabling is carried on in continuous contact with the PI

A reduced number of success cases are selected to pass to enhancement activity

Application support Workflow

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DEISA/PRACE User services

• Common production environment

• Application/services monitoring

• Help desk and trouble ticket system

• User documentation

• Advanced application support

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DEISA/PRACE Common Production Environment

• Defines Common Software Stack for all platforms– As homogeneous as possible within architecture clusters

(IBM Power, CRAY XT, IBM BlueGene)• Supported with modules tool

– “Module load DEISA/PRACE” sets common environment • Status is monitored with Inca tool

– Information available to users

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Monitoring of the applications availability

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Inca

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Central Trouble Ticket System

• Based on Resource Tracker (RT)• Internally used and for user support (helpdesk) as the

central tool for reporting problems or requests• General ticket queue and a queue for each partner site• Access is through a web interface or by e-mail (a user

must be a registered user of the infrastructure) • User tickets end up in the general queue

– The DEISA helpdesk (a task scheduled to sites on a weekly basis) assigns a ticket to the appropriate site queue (tickets can be cloned too)

• User interface different from staff interface• Users are asked to use the DEISA TTS, not the local

support facilities – information available to all staff

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User Documentation

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User Documentation

• Generation of PDF versions formatted for convenient printing

• DEISA FAQ maintained

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• Actions toward both DECI projects and Virtual Communities to enhance the usage of the user oriented DEISA services, middleware and tools

• Presentation on DEISA Services given to DECI users– Covers basic facts on certificates, access

mechanisms, job management, accounting information, global file system, data transfer, DCPE, Modules, monitoring and user documentation

• Meetings with the members of DECI projects are organized, to establish a work plan for the project, to present the DEISA Services available and to describe the User Support organisation– Fast feedback from the users– Gives a possibility to enhance the use of various

DEISA services

Advanced Application Production Assistance

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Interoperability

• Application enabling – share expertise like is done within DEISA/PRACE?

• Link Trouble Ticket systems ? – much effort needed with little output

• Sharing user documentation – e.g. about the use of X.509 certificates

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