Quick Information

In order to meet the demands of high performance computing (HPC) researchers, large-scale computational and storage machines require many staff members who design, install, and maintain these systems. These HPC systems professionals include system engineers, system administrators, network administrators, storage administrators and operations staff all who face problems that are specific to high performance systems.

The Systems Professionals Workshop intends to be a platform for discussing the unique challenges that come from supporting large-scale, high performance systems. We are soliciting submissions that speak directly to the state of the practice of standing up and operating high performance systems with an emphasis on solutions that can be implemented by systems staff at other institutions.

We will be presenting the Inaugural HPC Systems Professionals Workshop at SC 16 on Monday afternoon (November 14, 2016).

 Invited Paper: HPC Systems Acceptance: Controlled Chaos

Paul Peltz

System acceptance is critical when deploying HPC resources from small clusters to large supercomputers. Each type of system has its own challenges and having a well established and proven test, acceptance, and integration plan is an invaluable tool to the site and the vendor. The topic of systems acceptance is quite broad. This talk will be mostly focused on the system?s software and hardware components. Biography: Paul Peltz is a Scalable Systems Engineer in the High Performance Computing Division at Los Alamos National Laboratories where he helps procure, test, and integrate the new HPC systems into production. He has almost 20 years of experience collaborating with vendors to evaluate and integrate pre-release hardware and software. Currently he is the systems technical lead on the Trinity project and is actively working with Cray to deploy their largest XC system to date, a 110 cabinet XC40 named Trinity.

 Schedule

 Topics of Interest

Here are some topics of interest for this group. Note that these are here to indicate direction, not to disallow other related topics.

• Cluster, configuration, or software management
• Performance tuning/Benchmarking
• Resource manager and job scheduler configuration
• Monitoring/Mean-time-to-failure/ROI/Resource utilization
• Virtualization/Clouds
• Designing and troubleshooting HPC interconnects
• Designing and maintaining HPC storage solutions
• Cybersecurity and data protection
• Cluster storage

Example paper ideas might be:

• Best practices for job scheduler configuration
• Advantages of cluster automation
• Managing software on HPC clusters

 Information

• Call for Papers
• Calendar of events

  Event	Date
  Submission Deadline	August 26th
  Acceptance Notifications	September 30th (updated)
  Camera Ready Papers	October 21st (updated)
  Inaugural HPC Systems Professionals Workshop	November 14th

 Organizing Committee

 Program Committee

Call for Papers

The Call for papers is live. We are looking for papers related to HPC admining. Our submission deadline has been extended to August 26th, 2016.

 Contact Information

Please send email to hpcsyspros.

 Links

• HPC Sysadmin Mailing List - you should join!