OCCAM: a flexible, multi-purpose and extendable HPC cluster

TL;DR

OCCAM is a versatile, extendable HPC cluster designed for diverse scientific computing needs, supporting research and development in computational technologies with flexible resource management and performance characterization.

Contribution

The paper introduces the design, architecture, and resource management model of OCCAM, a flexible HPC cluster tailored for multiple scientific and technological applications.

Findings

Performance characterized by synthetic benchmarks

Supported diverse scientific use cases

Demonstrated reconfigurability and extendability

Abstract

The Open Computing Cluster for Advanced data Manipulation (OCCAM) is a multi-purpose flexible HPC cluster designed and operated by a collaboration between the University of Torino and the Sezione di Torino of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare. It is aimed at providing a flexible, reconfigurable and extendable infrastructure to cater to a wide range of different scientific computing use cases, including ones from solid-state chemistry, high-energy physics, computer science, big data analytics, computational biology, genomics and many others. Furthermore, it will serve as a platform for R&D activities on computational technologies themselves, with topics ranging from GPU acceleration to Cloud Computing technologies. A heterogeneous and reconfigurable system like this poses a number of challenges related to the frequency at which heterogeneous hardware resources might change their availability and shareability status, which in turn affect methods and means to allocate, manage, optimize, bill, monitor VMs, containers, virtual farms, jobs, interactive bare-metal sessions, etc. This work describes some of the use cases that prompted the design and construction of the HPC cluster, its architecture and resource provisioning model, along with a first characterization of its performance by some synthetic benchmark tools and a few realistic use-case tests.