The School of Informatics and Computing’s Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies (CREST) is one of a select group of partners working to develop a standardized high-performance computing stack to ease HPC deployment through OpenHPC.
Version 1.2 was released at SC16 in Salt Lake City; updates include several new components, a significant number of version updates, and a Tech Preview of ARM AArch64 builds. The number of available installation recipe guides has also expanded to support an additional resource manager.
Leading the OpenHPC initiative for IU’s involvement is CREST Director and Professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering Thomas Sterling.
“What was important was the fact that no one – individual or small group – could literally create a whole new class of supercomputing,” Sterling says. “But many people, across the country and around the world, could together. By associating ourselves with an emergent framework in which we could benefit from the work of many different people interested in different things but under a unifying guidance of scaffolding interfaces, we were able to achieve our objectives in low cost, HPC for end users.”
Sterling has been elected to the Board of Governors as well as the Technical Steering Committee of OpenHPC.
The mission of OpenHPC, a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, is to provide an integrated collection of HPC-centric components that can be used to provide full-featured reference HPC software stacks. Provided components should range across the entire HPC software ecosystem including provisioning and system administration tools, resource management, I/O services, development tools, numerical libraries, and performance analysis tools.
Indiana University is engaged with the project in a variety of ways. University Information Technology Services at IU is a part of the Linux Foundation, while Craig Stewart, associate dean, research technologies, is on the Technical Steering Committee.
The project, which had a soft launch at SuperComputing 15, launched an update with 60-plus packages in June at ISC16, which Sterling keynoted. OpenHPC hosted an inaugural HPC Systems Professional Workshop at SC16 in Salt Lake City on Monday, November 14. The Systems Professionals Workshop aimed to be a platform for discussing the unique challenges that come from supporting large-scale, high performance systems. OpenHPC members are working to:
- Create a stable environment for testing and validation: The community will benefit from a shared, continuous integration environment, which will feature a build environment and source control; bug tracking; user and developer forums; collaboration tools; and a validation environment.
- Reduce Costs: By providing an open source framework for HPC environments, the overall expense of implementing and operating HPC installations will be reduced.
- Provide a robust and diverse open source software stack: OpenHPC members will work together on the stability of the software stack, allowing for ongoing testing and validation across a diverse range of use cases.
- Develop a flexible framework for configuration: The OpenHPC stack will provide a group of stable and compatible software components that are continually tested for optimal performance. Developers and end users will be able to use any or all of these components depending on their performance needs, and may substitute their own preferred components to fit their own use cases.
OpenHPC members include:
Altair
Argonne National Laboratory
ARM
Atos
Berkely Lab
Barcelona Super Computing Center
Cea
Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies at Indiana University
Cineca
Cray
Dell
Fujitsu
Genci
Hewlett Packard
Intel
Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information
Lenovo
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Irz
ParTec Cluster Competence Center
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
Sandia National Laboratories
sgi
Suse
TACC
Univa