These are the slides for my talk on HPC Midlands' involvement in the JANET(UK) Project Moonshot pilot. For more information on Project Moonshot, please see https://www.ja.net/products-services/janet-futures/moonshot. For more on HPC Midlands, please see http://hpc-midlands.ac.uk

1. Moonshot Case Study: HPC Midlands
Martin Hamilton hpc-midlands.ac.uk

2. Contents
• Introducing HPC
Midlands
• Motivations for
Moonshot
• Early Moonshot Pilot
Findings
• Next Steps

3. Contents
• Introducing HPC
Midlands
• Motivations for
Moonshot
• Early Moonshot Pilot
Findings
• Next Steps

4. Introducing HPC Midlands
• BIS/EPSRC e-Infrastructure Centre
• Supercomputing for research and industry
• On demand access to HPC capacity
– Licensed software from leading
vendors, including ANSYS, CD-adapco and
MSC Software
• See hpc-midlands.ac.uk/launch-event for
case studies from E.ON, Rolls Royce and
Tata Steel

5. Introducing HPC Midlands
Hera cluster:
3,000 cores (48 Teraflops)
15TB RAM
120TB Lustre storage
Non-blocking QDR Infiniband
188 compute node blades
• 2 x 2.0GHz (8 core) Sandy Bridge
• 140 with 64GB RAM (4GB/core)
• 48 with 128GB RAM (8GB/core)

6. Introducing HPC Midlands
Note the 50 node (800 core) and 25 node (400 core) jobs!

7. HPC Midlands Applications

8. HPC Midlands Applications
CFD Based Study of
Unconventional Aeroengine
Exhaust Systems
T. Coates
G. J. Page
30th AIAA Applied Aerodynamics
Conference
DOI: 10.2514/6.2012-2775

9. Contents
• Introducing HPC
Midlands
• Motivations for
Moonshot
• Early Moonshot Pilot
Findings
• Next Steps

10. Motivations for Moonshot
• Desire to avoid separate HPC Midlands
credentials for service users
• Use organizational credentials for multiple
services, e.g. OpenSSH, Apache, Samba
• Delegated authority for managing user
identities and access to services
• Services built around the user not the
service providers (see next slide)
• Comfort zones: ssh keys, CLI etc

11. Slide credit: Gary Page / Leigh Lapworth

12. Motivations for Moonshot

13. Contents
• Introducing HPC
Midlands
• Motivations for
Moonshot
• Early Moonshot Pilot
Findings
• Next Steps

14. Early Moonshot Pilot Findings
• Dedicated HPC Midlands login node
allocated for development work
– Live DVD image also available for testing
• Moonshot RPMs from yum.dev.ja.net
– Patched versions of
FreeRADIUS, OpenSSH, Shibboleth SP, GSS
Server, libraries etc
– (Mostly) Install into /opt/moonshot
– RPM package dependency fun and games
with vendor respins (common for HPC)

15. Yum… (github coming soon)

16. Early Moonshot Pilot Findings
Moonshot up and running in test mode:
hera12# /opt/moonshot/bin/ssh -p 2222 -l "" 127.0.0.1
CTRL-EVENT-EAP-STARTED EAP authentication started
CTRL-EVENT-EAP-PROPOSED-METHOD vendor=0 method=21
CTRL-EVENT-EAP-METHOD EAP vendor 0 method 21 (TTLS) selected
CTRL-EVENT-EAP-SUCCESS EAP authentication completed successfully
[comth@hera12 ~]$
This proves that Moonshot enabled ssh, sshd, gss-
server, radiusd and shibd are all talking to each
other.

17. Contents
• Introducing HPC
Midlands
• Motivations for
Moonshot
• Early Moonshot Pilot
Findings
• Next Steps

18. Next Steps
• Get Moonshot installation up and running with
institutional RADIUS servers / Trust Router
– Loughborough contracted to JANET(UK) to provide
technical support for the Moonshot Pilot
– Leicester also working on Moonshot for DiRAC (HPC
for Particle Physics, Astronomy + Cosmology)
• Discussions with industrial collaborators
– Firewall holes, VPNs, SOCKS proxies etc
– Hosted Moonshot portal to manage access?
– JANET connectivity?

19. Next Steps

20. Next Steps

21. Next Steps

22. www.hpc-midlands.ac.uk
martin@hpc-midlands.ac.uk