Classroom HPC Resources

As the fall semester comes to a close those teaching need to start thinking about what resources they will need for their winter offerings.  Many may not realize that there are many options for using HPC resources in courses with no cost.

• LSA budgets the use of Flux, the on campus cluster
• Many Departments also provide Flux funding, contact ARC for details
• XSEDE Provides education allocations at no cost
• Amazon and Microsoft support teaching on their Clouds

Depending on what is being taught, most classes would be served by the above. Other organizations also provide classroom/teaching acess such as; NSF Blue Waters, and DoE NERSC.

Any questions about the difference resources can be directed to ARC at hpc-support@umich.edu.  We can provide consulting, guidance, and support.  This includes guest demo and training lectures in your classroom.

GLCPC Blue Waters Allocations Call Open

The Great Lake Consortium for Petascale Computation (GLCPC) is the easiest way to get access for moderate users of HPC CPU/GPU resources to gain access and use the Blue Waters super computer.

Proposals are due November 3rd, full details are available at the GLCPC website.

What is the difference between GLCPC Blue Waters allocations?
When there is the NSF Petascale Computing Resource Allocation (PRAC) program for Blue Waters?

The bar is higher for the NSF allocations, they expect users to have significant resource need and run at extreme scale.  If your work falls into this area please apply to the NSF program, which are due November 14th.  GLCPC is only granted a small portion of the Blue Waters system ~3.5 Million node hours. GLCPC is also only available to GLCPC members, which Michigan is one.

The availability of time on Blue Waters is broken down as:

• 80% or more NSF Petascale Computing Resource Program (PRAC)
• 7% University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• 2% Great Lake Consortium for Petascale Computation
• 1% Teaching/Education

For most HPC users access via GLCPC is the most appropriate choice, and for a small subset the NSF Petascale program also applies.

How does GLCPC compare to XSEDE?
When should I pursue XSEDE or GLCPC?

GLCPC in the number of hours it can give away is about on par with medium to small XSEDE allocations.  Currently XSEDE also does not have a long lived large scale GPU/CUDA capable machine while Blue Waters is capable of that.

As always contact us at hpc-support@umich.edu if you have questions.