Current and future directions for HPC at Pawsey Supercomputing Centre

Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is one of two national high performance computing centres in Australia providing ‘tier 1’ HPC services to researchers. Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is operated by a joint venture made of up of partner universities and CSIRO with operational and capital investment from the WA State government and the Australian Federal Government. Pawsey is currently in the early stages of the design and procurement of a new generation of computational infrastructure with a new $70m investment, made available in mid 2018. Rapid and emerging change in the demands made on the infrastructure by an increasingly diverse research community requires specific technical solutions to be developed during this process. We will discuss this rapid change, where Pawsey is now and how we are addressing evolving requirements with our current infrastructure. We will also discuss where HPC is challenged in the coming period and how we are expecting to meet these challenges. ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S) Ugo Varetto, Chief Technical Officer, is an accomplished manager, bringing international experience, including computational science, research, supporting complex, distributed software solutions, software engineering and development, architecture and testing to Pawsey. His focus is particularly on data-intensive high-performance computing, interactive-distributed visualisation solutions, with ‘real world’ experience of leading distributed teams across several continents. He has held key roles in significant projects, such as the EU funded ‘Human Brain Project’ and also contributed to numerous research projects with the European supercomputing infrastructure. His current work includes developing scalable artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning solutions on HPC systems and integrating interactive, in situ visualisation with data mining.Mark Gray is the Cloud Lead at Pawsey Supercomputing Centre where he manages Nimbus, a national cloud service for researchers in Australia. Mark has experience in DevOps roles at Pawsey, IMOS, AusCover and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Mark represents Pawsey Supercomputing Centre both nationally and internationally, with respect to the use of Nimbus. He also provides project management skills for projects of key strategic importance to the Centre. Mr Gray brings a strong research and data management background to his role of managing all aspects of this service. This includes procurement, deployment, training, user expectation management – and leadership of the team who administer and operate the service.