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Large-Scale Scientific Computingin The Netherlands

Evert.Lammerts@SARA.nlLykle.Voort@SARA.nl

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ProgramIntroducing SARA & Computing (15 slides)● Our Work● Large-Scale Computing

Discussion● What you do● What we can do together

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Our Work

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Facilitating Science in The Netherlands with Equipment for

and Expertise on Large-Scale Computing, Large-Scale

Data Storage, High-Performance Networking,

eScience, and Visualization

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What We DoOperations● Maintenance of physical infrastructure

● Renewing infrastructure

Support● Help scientists to use the infrastructure

● Consultancy for projects

Development● Services, interfaces, visualization tools, and so on

Innovation● Keep track of developments in the field

● Evaluation of new technologies in pilot projects

Pro jec t Bas ed

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How We Do ItAs partner in projects● Usually larger; maybe in time, maybe in amount, maybe in

ambition, maybe in perspective, ...● Roles in organization, reporting, …● “Infrastructure” partners, in the broadest sense

Using resource requests● Typically dealing with one scientist or a small consortium,

solving a certain problem● (Hands-on) support and access to resources● We help with the requests (this is simple!)

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● Foundation National Compute Facilities

● Part of NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research

● Resource requests for Huygens, Lisa and GPU

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● A collaboration between

● NCF● NIKHEF● NBIC● SARA

● Resource requests for Grid, Cloud and Hadoop

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Large-Scale Computing

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Parallelization:Amdahl's Law

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Data Parallelization

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For exampleBBMRI / Genome of The Netherlands (GvNL)

● Alignment and of sequenced genomes of 750 people

● 750 times the same pipeline of applications

The Virtual Knowledge Studio

● How do categories on Wikipedia evolve over time?

● Periodically look through Wikipedia dumps and build category trees

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Task Parallelization

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For example

CosmoGrid

● Simulate clusters of stars in a region of the universe

● Everything affects everything

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Scientific Computingin The Netherlands

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http://www.sara.nl

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PS

Did you know we have placed a cluster at WUR?

https://grid.sara.nl/wiki/index.php/Life_Science_Grid