CCS User Exchange Forum

The UM modeling community has started to take advantage of the hardware/software/personnel resources that the HPC initiative has recently put in place under the umbrella of the Center for Computational Science. The computing/networking and storage capacity are currently (as of 8/26/2008) adequate enough to permit serious (publication-grade) simulation to take place.

The hardware/software/personal expansion alone is not enough to fulfill the vision of the Computational Science Initiative at UM. This expansion must be matched by the growth of a user community to anchor the center's scientific aims, provide its administrators with the user's requirements, and spread the (computational) knowledge base among the center's users and the university community at large. To this date the user community remains dispersed among the 3 university campuses, often confined to semi-enclosed research group.

The aim of this series of informal talks is to foster the formation of high performance computing user community within UM. In summary this community building effort aims to:

Increase awareness of Computational Science among UM students and researchers.
Enhance interdisciplinary interaction among faculty, research staff and students with a view to encourage collaboration at a unviersity-wide level.
inform CCS' administrators about their users' computational/training requirements, and guide CCS's users training and future planning.
Potential for course development that can serve interdisciplinary education and research purposes at RSMAS.
nurturing a modern, high-tech, intellectual flavor for research at RSMAS.

The following requirements must be considered in starting to put this effort together:

Event logistics:

University-wide communication: The user community is currently spread on 3 campuses, it is imperative to bring them together if we are to build university-wide links. We suggest thus that the venue for the meeting/presentation be rotated among the campuses. An opening ceremony at RSMAS would be useful as it can naturally evolve into a happy hour on a Friday afternoon. The frequency of the meetings is an issue also as most people are already to committed to their departmental seminars. If weekly presentation prove to be too much, then a monthly schedule maybe be more appropriate.

Event format

The effort will be hampered by the different computing cultures of the different users (CFD versus genomics for example) and the different expertise levels (HPC developers versus users of Black Box models). The most effective route to foster collaboration is to discuss the nuts and bolts of HPC in terms of computing needs, algorithms, programming, etc... It then becomes necessary to limit the temptation to razzle dazzle with PowerPoint presentation, and focus on algorithms. It would be then useful to require that most presentation be done on a white board with no access to PowerPoint or slides (discussions on these issues would be useful). This would tend to favor algorithm discussion which may or may not be appropriate to the UM community.

Event Administration

The effort must be lead by the user community with support from the CCS center. The onus will then be on the user community to organize and coordinate this effort. Reliance on the CCS may, first overburden the latter at a time when it is still busy setting up the system, and two re-enforce a sense of reliance/dependency on the center's staff. Nevertheless, the effort must be coordinated with the CCS staff as they are so far the only one with a bird's eye view of the user community.