The APAC National Facility was established at the Australian National University to satisfy demands of Australian researchers for large-scale computation. The resources of the National Facility consist of a range of computing systems, software, mass storage systems, visualisation systems and data communications as well as professional staff.
The National Facility began operation in April 2001 with the installation of an
HP Alphaserver SC computer system. The National Facility is hosted at the ANU
through an agreement under which ANU provides computing services and professional
support for users. A revised agreement was approved on 16 April 2004 to continue
the management arrangements for another 3 years (to March 2007). APAC's
peak system has 1680 processors, 3.56 terabytes of memory, 100 terabytes of disk
and a peak speed of over 11 trillion calculations per second. Installed in the
first half of 2005, this system is ranked 26th in the June 2005 TOP500 list which
has the world's most powerful systems. In
more detail:
Other computational systems at the National Facility include:
Mass
Data Storage System (MDSS)
The MDSS is closely integrated with the computational systems and provides large-scale data storage for both computational and other data intensive projects. The core of the MDSS is a StorageTek Powderhorn 9310 robotic tape library with 6000 tape slots, 12 tape drives and a large disk cache.
The total capacity is 1.2 Pbytes and plans are underway to increase this to 6 Pbytes in 2006. The SAM-FS hierarchical storage management software from Sun Microsystems moves data transparently to and from the disk cache and tape as required.
Networking
The National Facility systems are connected to the GrangeNet and AARNet high-speed networks providing gigabit links to researchers around the country.
AARNet also provides a gigabit link to research and education networks overseas.
Computational
Tools and Techniques
The APAC Computational Tools and Techniques program develops and provides specialised support of some applications and tools at the APAC National Facility and Partner facilities, with each Partner taking the lead in a project area. Projects include Performance Tools and Monitoring, Earth Systems, Matlab-style programming environments, framework environments in Geophysics, SIESTA computational chemistry and high energy physics.
The program also coordinates an information service to APAC users on the availability of software, documentation and other notes relevant to users at both the National facility and Partner facilities. This information is provided the the software and facilities map at http://nf.apac.edu.au/facilities/software/
The National Facility's team of experts supports users around the nation. The team has written sophisticated software to optimise job scheduling, achieving better than 95 per cent efficiency, a very high rate against those achieved by facilities overseas. The team provides a help desk and advanced computing techniques and tools for users.
More than 80 third-party software packages are installed on the National Facility along with an extensive set of code development tools.
In the first half of 2005, the National Facility serviced 233 projects and 743 users with a further 74 associated researchers.
Under the resource
share model, APAC has access to 42.2% of the resources of the National Facility.
Nearly all of APAC's share was awarded to researchers at Australian higher education
institutions with a small fraction being used to support potential users and for
education and training. Calls for applications to use this share are made regularly
through the partners and higher education institutions. An APAC Merit Allocation
Committee assesses the applications and determines the grants for these resources.
The following diagram shows the kinds of applications for the projects with
MAS grants. The applications are categorised by the Australian Research Council
Research Divisions which PIs identify in their applications. The resource unit
is the time used by the projects (‘walltime’) during the period January-June 2004.
Resource
Shares
The National Facility operates on a `resource share' model whereby
partners and other organisations can make cash and in-kind contributions that
buy a share of the resources of the National Facility. Merit Allocation Scheme
APAC's share of the
resources on the National Facility has been reserved for staff in higher education
institutions and their collaborators in other research organisations, government
and industry.
Research groups have been able to ask APAC or ANU to store large-scale data on the mass data storage system on a ‘user pays’ basis. Unfortunately many research groups with significant data sets don’t have the funds or the expertise to manage them effectively and make them available to a broader community.
At its March 2004 meeting, the Board approved a ‘data-intensive’ initiative within the National Facility program to support users with large-scale data sets. The initiative was recommended by the National Facility review last year and was an outcome from the Projects Workshop endorsed by the external advisers.
The initiative provides selected research groups with support to manage large-scale data sets of national significance. The support involves a grant to store large-scale data on the MDSS of the National Facility as well as expert advice on the access and management of this data.
The initiative recognises that advice on how to access and store large scale data sets is an important task for many research groups. The advice might involve developing an information architecture for data sets which need to be accessed by researchers around Australia and perhaps internationally. It might also involve the evaluation of tools for Web-based access, resource discovery, metadata management, digital curation and archiving.
Further information on the initiative can be found under 'Accounts' on the National Facility website.
Dr
Ben Evans
Acting Manager, APAC National Facility
ANU Supercomputer
Facility
Leonard Huxley Building (56)
The Australian National University
CANBERRA ACT 0200
| Phone: | +612 6125 4967 |
| Fax: | +612 6125 8199 |
