UC Davis Cyberinfrastructure

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UC Davis Cyberinfrastructure

• Peter M. Siegel
• CIO and Vice Provost

Russ Hobby CI Architect, UC Davis
September 16, 2008
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Cyberinfrastructure

• Familiar IT services concept but massive
  differences in
• Scale
• national or global projects, not campus
• systems are orders of magnitudes larger in
  performance, storage, connect speed,
• Access
• to/from everywhere, not just in-building
• 24/7, not just during site review
• Planning Horizons
• new centers require infrastructure in hours or
  days, not years
• clusters are obsolete before they are plugged in
• have led to cultural change, esp. in the
  university

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Cyberinfrastructure
CI requires a holistic, multi-disciplinary,
multi-institutional view that few of us were
really trained for.
Today
Research- oriented services
Teaching learning services
CI
Admin. services
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Chancellors Fall Conference

• Chancellors Conference held Sept. 16-18, 2007
• Information Technology as a Vehicle for
  Innovation at UC Davis
• 150 attendees - students, faculty, staff, alumni,
  administrators
• Using technology most effectively to advance the
  university's missions of teaching, research and
  public outreach
• "The purpose of this conference was to examine
  our priorities regarding IT, to help the
  campus make the right investments, and to work
  towards stronger collaboration."
• -- Interim Vice Provost Barbara Horwitz

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Chancellors Fall Conference

• Premise IT is important
• A university is an "information industry" where
  knowledge is key
• Use of this knowledge often entails IT as a tool
  or conduit
• IT has become a necessity for members of a
  university
• Scientists, educators, students, and
  administrative staff require information
  technology to achieve their goals
• IT is essential for collaboration, expression,
  creation of new knowledge, and innovation in
  science and the arts
• IT is infrastructure, much like electricity,
  telephones, buildings
• Universities that invest in robust and modern IT
  have a significant competitive advantage over
  those that do not

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Chancellors Fall Conference

• Simple, powerful vision for UC Davis
• Become a campus that is internationally
  recognized for its development and use of
  information technologies (IT) in support of
  innovation and excellence in teaching,
  scholarship, and engagement.

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Nature of Research is Changing

• Research is being done by discipline groups with
  participants from institutions covering wide
  geographic areas
• These groups rely on Cyberinfrastructure to work
  together as though they were in the same location

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The Research and Educational Networks
International Networks
National Backbones
Regional Network
Regional Network
Campus Network
Campus Network
Computer
Computer
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The UCD Campus Network

• Production Network
• Departmental vLANs across multiple buildings
• Routed IP Network between departments
• Research Network
• Direct connections to the campus border
• Explores new network technologies

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Sacramento Wide Area Network (SWAN)

• Create text to explain below

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CENIC Connections

• Three CENIC wide area connections at UCD and
  three at UCDMC
• CENICs Digital California (CSUs, Community
  Colleges, and K-12) and the commodity ISP
  connections are at one gigabit/second at both
  locations
• The HPR Connection at UCDMC is at one
  gigabit/second
• The HPR connection at Davis is newly upgraded to
  10 gigabits/second and runs through a separate
  router
• UCD and UCDMC are interconnected via dedicated
  fiber using wave division multiplexors that
  support one gigabit channels

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ComputationalResources
National Centers
Shared Regional Clusters
Resource Scheduler
Private Regional Clusters
Shared Resource Scheduler
Shared Campus Clusters
Private Campus Clusters
Desktop/ Laptop
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Campus Computing

• Historically computing (clusters) created and
  operated by individual researchers
• Need for better support and space
• Evaluation of options for campus Research
  Computing
• Coordinate with regional and national resources

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StorageResources
National Centers
Discipline Repositories
Distributed Storage
Campus Storage
Libraries/ Collections
Computing/ Access
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Collaboration

• The distributed nature of todays research
  creates the need for tools to allow researchers
  to easily work together even though they are at
  various locations
• Collaboration is also becoming increasingly
  important in teaching as online or remote classes
  grow.

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Middleware

• Research Communities have a need for federated
  identity management
• They dont want to use a separate login for each
  application they use
• Discipline Management when people are from
  multiple institutions can be hard
• Similar issues exist for classes shared between
  institutions

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Traditional Infrastructure

• Power
• HVAC
• Buildings (space)
• Costs of all these are going up and ways to be
  more efficient need to be evaluated

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Parts Are Not Enough

• CI is complex and consists of many parts
• Even when all the components are working
  correctly independently, performance of the
  application is often not optimal

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Case Study

• UCD Physicist was getting poor performance to
  Fermilab, the network is slow
• With expert help he obtained an eight-fold
  increase in throughput (he could have gotten
  better but thought it was good enough)
• The cause was tuning of the OS and application,
  not the network.

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Continuing Problem

• Internet2 started the End-to-End Performance
  Initiative six years ago
• Many performance problems have been found
• Diagnostic tools have been developed
• But yet the default without help is still poor
  performance

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CI as a System

• How can we make all the parts work together so
  that getting good performance happens
  automatically rather than after experts have
  spent countless hours diagnosing problems?
• Like environmentalists are realizing that all
  parts of an ecosystem interact, we need to study
  CI to understand these interactions.

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