Running Your Own Software in Central HPC-AI System

Wang Junhong, Research Computing, NUS Information Technology

Background

Researchers may purchase specialized software tools for their research projects which involves numeric simulation or modelling. Most of the time, researchers were satisfied to just run such simulation in an office workstation or computer when the numerical model size is not that huge and the computing time is reasonable. However, they may find it inconvenient when a large numerical model is created, resulting in significant longer computing time (such as days or weeks) to complete the simulations. This task would be very challenging if the user decides to run it on the office desktop/computer, which might require them to monitor the interactive simulation 24×7. In addition, the limited computational resources on the office desktop/computer will become a bottleneck when the resource requirements of the simulations of the numerical models increase or even when there is a need to support multiple team members in the research group.

About the Service

In order to help researchers overcome the difficulties of running many large and long computing time simulations concurrently and to support multiple team members using the same software tool, the Research Computing tower in NUS Information Technology has offered the software hosting service. Researchers can install and host their software tools in the CentOS Linux-based high-performance computing (HPC) system, and they can then submit and run their simulations in the fair-share job queue free of charge.  Researchers will enjoy the following benefits when they consider utilising the software hosting service:

1. Be able to run large and long simulations in the central HPC system by having access to more CPU cores, higher memory and larger workspace for better performance;
2. Be able to submit and run multiple simulations concurrently using the fair-share job scheduler in the HPC system;
3. Be able to share the software license among eligible team members so that they can use the software in the HPC system; and
4. Be able to receive technical support on software installation and training on using the HPC system.

Do note that the software hosting service is not to replace the way which the researchers have been running their software tools in their office. What it offers is just an alternative for researchers if they find the listed benefits useful to them. In fact, users could also operate concurrently as illustrate in the below diagram. As the software tools are commonly licensed to be used by checking out a license to run from either a local license server or a cloud license server or using a license entitlement/token, the software tools installed in the HPC system can be used following the similar way to check out a license. This way, it is transparent and flexible for researchers if they wish to run their software tools either way that that suits the demand.

To date, we have successfully installed and hosted COMSOL, Star-CCM+, Flow3D, LS-DYNA and Stata for a few research groups. Customised trainings on how to submit and run these software tools using the HPC system have also been developed and provided to individual research group.

How to Apply

If you would like to have access to the software hosting service, please  contact us by submitting an HPC Enquiry ticket in the nTouch portal. We would be happy to meet you for any further discussion and assistance.