Cheaha:Community Portal

HPC Services Plans

Mission

HPC Services is the division within the IT Infrastructure Services organization with a focus on HPC support for research and other HPC activities. HPC Services support includes HPC Cluster Support, Networking & Infrastructure, Middleware, and Academic Research Support. By Research, it is meant specifically to assist or collaborate with grant activities that require IT resources. In addition, it may also include acquiring and managing high performance computing resources, such as Beowulf clusters and network storage arrays. HPC Services participates in institutional strategic planning and self-study as related to academic IT. HPC Services represents the Office of Vice-President of Information Technology to IT-related academic campus committees, regional / national technology research organizations and/or committees as requested.

Note: The term HPC is used to mean high performance computing, which has many definitions available on the web. At UAB, HPC generally refer to “computational facilities substantially more powerful than current desktops computers (PCs and workstations) …by an order of magnitude or better.” See http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks/docs/hpc-intro/node3.html for more description of this usage of HPC.

HPC Project Five Year Plan

As a result of discussions between IT, CIS, and ETL to determine the best methods and associated costs to interconnect HPC clusters in campus buildings BEC and CH, a preliminary draft of scope and five year plan for HPC at UAB was prepared. In order to ensure growth and stability of IT support for research computing and to obtain wide support for academic researchers for a workable model the mission of IT Academic Computing has been revised and merged into a more focused unit within IT Network & Infrastructure Services under the name of HPC Services, which is the division within the IT Infrastructure Services.

a new merged organization to include HPC Services. See attached Organization Chart.