Best practices and lessons from deploying and operating a sustained-petascale system: The blue waters experience

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Building and operating versatile extreme-scale computing systems that work productively for a range of frontier research domains present many challenges and opportunities. Solutions created, experiences acquired, and lessons learned, while rarely published, could drive the development of new methods and practices and raise the bar for all organizations supporting research, scholarship, and education. This paper describes the methods and procedures developed for deploying, supporting, and continuously improving the Blue Waters system and its services during the last five years. Being the first US sustained-petascale computing platform available to the open-science community, the Blue Waters project pioneered various unique practices that we are sharing to be adopted and further improved by the community. We present our support and service methodologies, and the leadership practices employed for ensuring that the system stays highly efficient and productive. We also provide the return on investment summaries related to deploying and operating the system.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, SC 2018
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages673-684
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781538683842
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2 2018
Event2018 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, SC 2018 - Dallas, United States
Duration: Nov 11 2018Nov 16 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, SC 2018

Conference

Conference2018 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, SC 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityDallas
Period11/11/1811/16/18

Keywords

  • Best practices
  • HPC center
  • System management

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Theoretical Computer Science

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