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.
After a successful first workshop last year, we are planning the 2017 version. The workshop will be Monday, November 13, 2017 from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM.
Keynote Speaker
Greg Kurtzer, Singularity
Singularity is a container technology which is widely supported by HPC centers and service providers because it facilitates extreme mobility of compute via verifiable, trusted container images. This talk will cover a high level view of Singularity, usage and deployment information (including security, administration and capabilities).
Greg Kurtzer is the CEO and Founder of SingularityWare, HPC Architect at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and creator of Centos Linux and Warewulf.
Call for Papers
Supercomputing systems present complex challenges to personnel who design, deploy and maintain these systems. Standing up these systems and keeping them running require novel solutions that are unique to high performance computing. The success of any supercomputing center depends on stable and reliable systems, and HPC Systems Professionals are crucial to that success.
The Second Annual HPC Systems Professionals Workshop will bring together systems administrators, systems architects, and systems analysts in order to share best practices, discuss cutting-edge technologies, and advance the state-of-the-practice for HPC systems. Submissions are encouraged that discuss all aspects of HPC systems design, implementation, maintenance, and security.
Download our Call for Papers Flyer. Submissions are via EasyChair.
Schedule
| Start | End | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 9:00 AM | 9:20 AM | Welcome |
| 9:20 AM | 9:40 AM | Automated System Health and Performance Benchmarking Platform: High Performance Computing Test Harness with Jenkin |
| 9:40 AM | 10:00 AM | Improving the Start-Up Time of Python Applications on Large Scale HPC Systems |
| 10:00 AM | 10:30 AM | Break |
| 10:30 AM | 11:30 AM | Filesystem Panel |
| 11:30 AM | 11:50 AM | Panel Q&A |
| 11:50 AM | 12:10 PM | A Summary of the Workshop on Training and Sustaining Research Computing Systems Professionals - A Path to a Profession (Pre-print link) |
| 12:10 PM | 12:30 PM | Linux Clusters Institute Workshops: Building the HPC and Research Computing Systems Professionals Workforce |
| 12:30 PM | 1:30 PM | Lunch |
| 1:30 PM | 2:20 PM | Singularity: Greg Kurtzer |
| 2:20 PM | 2:40 PM | There and Back Again: A Case Study of Configuration Management of HPC |
| 2:40 PM | 3:00 PM | Lessons from the IBM Blue Gene Series of Supercomputers |
| 3:00 PM | 3:30 PM | Break |
| 3:30 PM | 4:00 PM | Lightning Talks |
| 4:00 PM | 5:00 PM | Open Discusssion |
| 5:00 PM | 5:30 PM | SIGHPC-SYSPROS Chapter Meeting |
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
Calendar
| Event | Date |
|---|---|
| Workshop Proposal Submission | February 5, 2017 |
| Paper Submission Deadline | September 10, 2017 |
| Paper Acceptance Notifications | September 30, 2017 |
| Lightning Talk Deadline | October 27, 2017 |
| Camera ready papers | October 6, 2017 |
| Workshop | November 13, 2017 (9:00 AM to 5:30 PM) |
Organizing Committee
| Position | Name | Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| Chair | Randy Herban | Microsoft |
| Vice Chair | Jenett Tillotson | Indiana University |
| Program Committee Chair | Alex Younts | Purdue University |
| Organizing Committee | William Scullin | Argonne |
| Isaac Traxler | LSU | |
| David Clifton | Ansys | |
| Paul Peltz | Los Alamos |
Program Committee
| Name | Affiliation |
|---|---|
| Siddharth Bhatia | BITS Pilani |
| John Blaas | CU Boulder |
| Brett Bode | University of Illinois |
| Matt Ezell | Oak Ridge National Laboratory |
| Sharan Kalwani | Michigan State |
| David King | NCSA |
| Honwai Leong | NCSA |
| Scott McMillan | NVidia |
| Jeff Raymond | University of Pittsburgh |
| Mike Requa | Microsoft |
| Randy Schauer | Raytheon Company |
| Andy Sydelko | Purdue |
| Jenett Tillotson | Indiana University |
Contact Information
Please send email to hpcsyspros.
Links
- HPC Sysadmin Mailing List - you should join!