hpc-ch forum on User-Centric View on HPC

Thursday 6 Oct 2022, 08:45 → 15:35 Europe/Zurich

H8-01-D (Campus Biotech)

Arnaud Hungler (Health 2030 Genome Center), Ioannis Xenarios (Health 2030 Genome Center), Michele De Lorenzi (CSCS)

Placing users at the centre of the design of HPC Infrastructure has been always a challenging effort. With the democratization of computational usage in different fields of biomedical science, rethinking and reshaping HPC is a necessity. Regardless of the context (large university supercomputer, small company cluster or anything in between), considering the usage before design or maintenance is even more critical. 
HPC resource mutualization is also an under-appreciated aspect from a user perspective. Balancing the needs and requirements for an efficient HPC infrastructure will be the central topic of this HPC-CH conference. 

• How to understand your users' needs? 
• What impact does the usage have on the design and maintenance? 
• How to make different use cases co-hosted? (Single large parallel job versus many small jobs, or direct user versus automated software) 
• How do you teach your users? / How do the users teach you? 
• How to manage the compromise between usability and security  

08:45 → 09:30 Registration (Campus Reception Desk)

09:00 → 09:30 Welcome Coffee (H8 foyer)

09:30 → 10:00 Campus Biotech Visit (meeting point: H8 foyer)

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10:00 → 10:15 Welcome and Introduction

Speakers: Arnaud Hungler (Health 2030 Genome Center), Ioannis Xenarios (Health 2030 Genome Center), Keith Harshman (Health 2030 Genome Center), Michele De Lorenzi (CSCS)

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10:15 → 10:45 Genomics and HPC: Use Cases and Challenges

The talk will introduce the data analysis and data management needs at the core of the Health 2030 Genome Center and how we operate an internal HPC cluster and the custom software to address these needs.

Speakers: Arnaud Hungler (Health 2030 Genome Center), Ilya Kolpakov (Health 2030 Genome Center)

HPC-CH Genomics[1].pdf

10:45 → 11:15 How to Nurture the ORD Superheroes?

In her talk, Oksana will explore what user-centricity means in the context of the Open Research Data (ORD) challenges. The inherent complexity of ORD tasks frequently leads to solutions that are hard to use. Likewise, the inevitable tradeoffs when designing systems for complicated tasks hinder usability. Oksana will exemplify how her team engages with users to co-create solutions that inspire and nudge ORD best practices. She will reveal favored approaches for building user-centered flows to create user experiences that nurture ORD superheroes.

Speaker: Oksana Riba Grognuz (SDSC)

221006_ORG_How_to_nurture_ORD_superheroes.pdf

11:15 → 11:45 Real-Time Workflow and Application with High Performance by Cloud Security Enabled HPC for On-Demand Activity Calculations for HIPA

Scientific computing including accelerators, detectors and experiment automation requires large computer resources, therefore running these simulations on HPC is leading to rapid growth.

Nowadays, academic research projects and industrial platform solutions proposed infrastructures allow remote high-performance capacity for simulations and data analysis in security. However, these on-demand cloud services explore cloud security leakage and performance degradation issues.

The Vis-aS project proposes an efficient workflow, cloud security enabled HPC and data storage to provide the high-performance and security-enabled environment for the Vis-aS project, which has a web application used for activity calculations for the high-intensity proton accelerator (HIPA) at Paul Scherrer Institute ( PSI).

Speaker: Mei-Chih Chang (PSI)

hpc-ch_chang[1].pdf

11:45 → 13:15 Lunch and Networking

13:15 → 13:45 An Alternative to One-Size-Fits-All Programming Environments

The programming environment - the compilers, libraries and tools provided to users building their own applications - is the main interface for the majority of HPC system users. Typically HPC centers provide a single environment that provides a rich set of tools and libraries, configured via module files to meet the needs of individual use cases. As centers offer HPC access to more communities with diverse workflows this "one size fits all" approach becomes very difficult to maintain. This talk will look at alternative approaches for providing use-case specific environments being developed for the Alps system at CSCS.

Speaker: Ben Cumming (CSCS)

User Environments on Alps.pdf

13:45 → 14:15 A Tale of Cattle and Pets

Given the HPC community at the University of Lausanne is highly heterogenous, some users perfectly fit the regular HPC environments while others need some helpers. This talk presents the journey of a new HPC user at UNIL, from the introductory courses, through the computing facility offers, and the craft of customization for specific needs.

Speaker: Emmanuel Jeanvoine (University of Lausanne)

2022_10_06__HPC-CH.pdf

14:15 → 14:30 Farewell and End of the Meeting