D5.1: Preliminary Guidance on Procurements and Infrastructure

The PRACE-2IP Work Package 5 (WP5), “Best Practices for HPC Systems Commissioning”, has two objectives:

• Procurement, independent vendor relations and market watch (task 1)
• Best practices for HPC Centre Infrastructures (task 2)

This Work Package builds on and expands the important work started in the PRACE Preparatory Phase project (PRACE-PP WP7) and continued through PRACE 1st Implementation Phase (PRACE-1IP WP8), which have all sought to reach informed decisions within PRACE as a whole on the acquisition and hosting of HPC systems and infrastructure.
WP5 provides input for defining and updating procurement plans and strategies through the sharing of the state of the art and best practices in procuring and operating production HPC systems.
Task 1 – Assessment of petascale systems – has performed a continuous market watch and analysis of trends in petascale HPC systems worldwide. The information, collected from public sources and industry conferences, is presented through comparisons and graphs that allow an easier and quicker examination of trends for different aspects of top-level HPC systems. Specific areas of interest are analysed in depth in terms of the market they belong to and the general HPC landscape, with a particular emphasis on the European point of view.
As well as the general market analysis, this task also describes the link between hardware and software (in collaboration with software-specific work packages WP11 and WP12), providing information on the supported interfaces (programming models), benchmark results and user requirements.
Task 2 – Best practices for designing and operating power efficient HPC centre infrastructures – has continued the production of white papers which explore specific topics related to HPC data centre design and operation, with input from PRACE members. It has also analysed the current state of the art in cooling and power efficient operating of HPC infrastructure.
In addition, this task also includes the organization of the fourth edition of the “European Workshop on HPC Centre Infrastructures”, which will be hosted by CSCS in Lugano in the spring of 2013.