Successful grant submissions and partnerships with the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology (K2I) and education-friendly corporations like IBM have allowed the Research Computing Support Group (RCSG) to offer multiple platforms and clusters on which Rice research teams can build and run their serial and parallel computing jobs. However, there were three main obstacles to overcome in 2013:
• Evaluate aging clusters for replacement
• Train graduate students about RCSG resources
• Find storage solutions for active use and archiving
Retiring and replacing aging supercomputer clusters was perhaps the most straightforward challenge. The oldest cluster is now scheduled for retirement in April 2014.
With faculty encouragement and support from the IT Task Force survey, RCSG began offering 30-60 minute workshops once or twice each month. Primarily directed at graduate students, the workshops are open to anyone interested in the session topic which ranges from Anatomy of a Cluster Job to Advanced Secure Shell for Power Users. Chandler Wilkerson, High Performance Computing (HPC) Cluster Architect, organizes the workshops and leads most sessions, and he also invites topic suggestions from the audience.
For storage solutions, several were considered and some were tested with pilot participants. SPICE was the obvious internal storage solution for researchers for big data research projects, but a revision of the charging model was required to meet grant funding requirements (see sidebar). Data management, another aspect of federal grant funding requirements, had been satisfied in 2012 through a collaboration of Fondren Library and RCSG, but many Principal Investigators (PIs) were still unaware of the new Data Management resources. A cloud collaboration solution, Box.com, was the most likely solution for active collaboration for both faculty and staff and included features for easily sharing documents with external collaborators. This solution was tested with a pilot group in fall 2013. Rice contracted with Box to supply U.S.-based Internet2 NetPlus Service for Rice faculty and staff in 2014.