Providing a Unified Software Environment for Canada's National Advanced Computing Centers
Maxime Boissonneault, Bart E. Oldeman, Ryan Paul Taylor · Proceedings of the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing on Rise of the Machines (learning) · 2019
Exploiting an advanced computing platform consisting of several clusters distributed across the second-largest country in the world is challenging. Each cluster may run a different operating system, use a different generation of CPU, GPU, or network fabric, or be managed by a different team of system administrators. Presenting a unified software environment can tremendously facilitate the task of supporting researchers, but is challenging to implement. This is nevertheless what Compute Canada set out to do in 2016, in the midst of deploying a new generation of large clusters.