Peter Clarke

1
Models for a sustainable NGSUniversity
Resources and fEC

• Peter Clarke
• Feb 22th 2007
• NeSC
• and Academic Director of ECDF
• (Edinburgh Compute and Data Facility)

2
Costs of Research Computing in Universities

• Obvious Elements to be covered
• Power and Environment 20
• Systems Staff 40
• Depreciation 40
• Other less obvious elements
• Service evolution
• Scalable and continuous requirements capture
• Middleware /software services
• Training and education (enabling efficient use of
  services)
• Software development (advancing code base
  technology)

3
What university research users need

• Baseline free at point of access service
• This has no guarantees but is available to all
  researchers
• Pre fEC grants
• Speculative nobel prize winning work
• Research without traditional research grants
  (e.g. humanities)

• Guaranteed Resource service
• This will guarantee a certain resource against
  agreed costs
• For specific projects with specific needs and
  funding sources
• Essential to be able to "commit" to a project
• Essential to obtain fEC costs from RCs

4
What university research users need (2)

• Agility

Service Level
Capability
5
What University /School /Department finance
probably believe

• Computing is like any other commodity (paper
  clips, animal houses)
• Researchers will be able to pay for everything
  they use from grants at 100 (80) immediately
  now there is fEC in place

6
The Disjoint

• Researchers dont have mindset to pay full costs
• It has to be cheaper than I think it will cost me
  to roll my own
• My dept doesnt charge me for power and my
  postdoc runs the system
• I dont want to loose flexibility
• Im not sure central services will give me what I
  want
• Research councils havn't fully assimilated this
  in practice
• Peer bodies may still not have bought in fully to
  the real consequences of fEC
• Owning computer means its in RC control.
• Still talk of "University contribution"
• Finance
• Not all research use of computing can get a grant
  to pay costs in advance - and we dont even want
  this to be the case. It is against the
  Universities research mission for this to be the
  case.
• Finance often groups dont understand this.

7

• In my opinion we are in danger of an unintended
  consequence of fEC on a major scale -
• I.e. decimation of legitimate access to computing
  for research for a few years.

8
My own model (1)

• Any research led University must provide a
  baseline free at point of access service if it is
  serious about research excellence
• Agile local Computing access is like a phone
• would we really want to say you cant make a phone
  call if you dont have a DA cost on a grant to
  pay the call charge ?
• Would we want to inhibit access to library on
  same basis ?.
• It should ideally be paid for via an indirect
  cost rolled up with other such research support
  like libraries. This could be agreed with RCs
• If not is must be an agreed DA cost on all grants
  (possibly weighted according to discipline)
• The University must then provide a way to channel
  those funds to support this !
• It is not very expensive to provide this within a
  University spread across all its research

9
My own model (2)

• Any research led University may provide a
  chargeable guaranteed resource service as part of
  the hierarchical agility-capability pyramid.
• It must be paid for as a DA cost on grants
• It must have auditable service level delivery
• It will inevitably appear to be much more
  expensive than the baseline service. We all have
  to understand this.
• It must be discounted heavily over a 5 year
  transition period to fEC to match the
  practicalities of transition.

See example gt
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My own model (3)

• Everyone must get away from the outdated idea
  that they have to own the hardware to provide the
  service, or to be a great University.
• We are all happy with the virtualisation/devolveme
  nt of networks - why not TBytes or CPU-cycles?
• Its all about virtualising - and raising the
  dotted line
• What is important is to provide the service the
  research community needs at a sensible price. If
  this means ACME-storgae PLC can provide the
  actual TBytes then so be it.
• You could imagine a PowerGen ltgt Scottish Power
  ltgt User relation
• This applies probably to TBytes and commodity CPU
  cycles in near term
• This probably doesnt apply to specialist HPC use
  in very near term

12
My vision The dotted line will rise
Scientific Data, Applications Knowledge
Discovery
Virtualised Computing Services
Computers Storage
The Internet
13
Relation to National Services

• I (now) see no conflict
• For HPC
• There is a clear separation of need for Campus
  scale ltgt National Scale resources.
• National services are already paid for
  realistically.
• Campus service just need to fit in on on open
  market.
• For commodity computing and storage
• There is no plan to fund masses of this centrally
  via JISC
• NGS role is not to provide free computing for all
  (nor could it)
• NGS provides much more important things. !!
• So I now dont think a free NGS undermines campus
  sustainablity
• But this is worthy of debate
• The more important question is what should NGS do
  so that JISC/RCs/Institutes will be happy to fund
  it in the way they do SuperJANET

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my list

• A baseline hardware service
• To set standard
• For evolution of service
• For development by users
• Defining a common standard for federating
  University resources
• Software certification, development, deployment
  planning
• Distributed community support
• Aggregation of requirements across Institutes
• Access to specialist services which it would be
  stupid to provide at each site
• Helpdesk
• .. and more.

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