03-20, 11:45–11:55 (US/Eastern), Belfer Case Study Room (CGIS S020)
Administrators and Research Consultants helping researchers scale their work can use Open OnDemand applications to make HPC resources more accessible to disciplines that are not traditionally identified as HPC users. A brief discussion of how we help make high performance computing (HPC) more approachable to new users, with an emphasis on the applications presented, support process, and using Open OnDemand as a launch pad to fully integrate new users into the HPC workflow.
Michigan State University (MSU) uses Open OnDemand extensively to support research on High Performance Computing (HPC) resources. Our foundational instruction courses and workshops use Open OnDemand to reduce the friction in getting started using the HPC.
In addition to presenting the standard graphical desktop, shell access, and file browser applications; we include a number of applications to help new HPC users start using the HPC systems at MSU, We also continue to work on adding additional applications to our Open OnDemand instance including LMStudio, and Ollama. One of our Interns has created a template to facilitate rapid development and we publish beta versions of applications to a testing group that users can opt into. To enable classroom usage without undue scheduling delays, our Open OnDemand instance defaults to using a designated partition that is not part of our general queue. This does not prevent the use of Open OnDemand on all our available resources and is explicitly used to facilitate the use of newer systems focusing on big data processing by research disciplines that haven't traditionally used HPC resources. We facilitate user support by tying the Submit Support Ticket email action into our help desk ticketing system. This lets us quickly identify issues with user submission errors and systemic issues with our Open OnDemand deployment.
I spent 24 years in the Army as a pilot, doing IT tasks for the Army and experimenting with Linux and networks at home. I earned a Computer Science and IT Management degree while serving in the military, transitioning to an IT career after leaving the service. After working a couple of different networking and security positions for a few years, I started working as a Linux Systems Administrator. I spent 3 years working at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University (MSU) and then transitioned to the Institute for Cyber Enabled Research (ICER) at MSU and High Performance Computing in 2020.