A terascale, cost-effective open solution for academic computing: early experience of the DAUIN HPC initiative
Federico Della Croce Di Dojola, Elio Piccolo, Nicolo' Nepote · 2011
Supercomputing plays an increasingly important role in academic research, due to its many interdisciplinary applications. This creates a growing demand for computational resources that the current national and European HPC infrastructure cannot always satisfy. Access to those systems is in fact controlled by calls that require months of planning. However, the creation of smaller HPC facilities inside universities or even single departments, presents problems such as difficulty to find system administrators with appropriate technical skills and high costs of HPC systems. This paper describes the experience of the DAUIN HPC Initiative at the Politecnico di Torino, which included the creation of a cluster reaching 1.0 TFLOPS with a very low budget and using mainly open-source software. The ease of access to computing resources, shared among the research groups of the department, made it possible to achieve encouraging results in less than six months.