Engineering New Faculty Orientation: Research Computing

Today Ken Powell, Andy Caird, and Amadi Nwankpa spoke to the new College of Engineering faculty about research computing.  The slides and handout are represented below.

Who's who on campus

IT Groups

CAEN

• has operational responsibilities for College of Engineering IT services and facilities.
• has five main groups: high-performance computing (HPC), web, applications, student computing environment, instructional technology
• http://caen.engin.umich.edu

ITS

• has operational responsibilities for University IT services and facilities
• http://its.umich.edu

Your departmental computing support

Research Computing Support

Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering

• administers the Rackham scientific computing PhD and scientific computing certificate
• helps point CoE faculty to appropriate HPC resources
• http://arc.research.umich.edu/micde/

Office of Advanced Research Computing (ARC)

• coordinates campus-level research computing infrastructure and events
• helps connect faculty in various colleges doing related work
• http://arc.research.umich.edu

What's What—HPC resources

Flux

• Recommended HPC resource for most CoE faculty
• Homogeneous collection of hardware owned by ARC and operated by CAEN HPC with purchasing/business/HR support by ITS.
• Run on an allocation model—faculty purchase by core-month allocation
• About 10,000 InfiniBand-connected cores, all owned by ARC. Used by about 120 research groups and several courses.
• http://caen.engin.umich.edu/hpc/overview

Flux Operating Environment

• For faculty who have hardware needs that differ from standard Flux
• Run on an ownership model—faculty buy their hardware, and it is incorporated and run for them in the Flux Operating Environment
• http://caen.engin.umich.edu/hpc/flux-operating-environment

Where to turn for help

• Purchasing a desktop or laptop for you or a student/post-doc in your group:
  • your departmental IT group
• Finding out whether a certain software package has already been licensed to the department, college or university:
  • your department IT person, or the CAEN software listing: http://caen.engin.umich.edu/software/overview
• Licensing a piece of software:
  • your department IT person, or Amadi Nwankpa (amadi@umich.edu), the CAEN faculty liaison and software guru
  • this is increasingly important to get correct
• Purchasing storage:
  • ValueStorage: http://www.itcs.umich.edu/storage/value/
• Assessing your HPC needs (cluster computing, storage):
  • Andrew Caird (acaird@umich.edu), the CAEN Director of HPC
  • hpc-support@umich.edu
• Getting your doctoral students enrolled in the Scientific Computing PhD or scientific computing certificate program:
  • Eric Michielssen (emichiel@umich.edu), the MICDE Director
• General questions about using HPC in your research:
  • Andrew Caird and Ken Powell

More Information

• Visit http://arc.research.umich.edu to learn about upcoming workshops (including the CI days workshop November 13th and 14th)
• E-mail hpc-support@umich.edu to discuss your HPC needs
• E-mail caen@umich.edu for other help