For the first time ever, we had our High-Performance Computing (HPC) Community of Practice in person since its inception in 2020! As the previous editions were held virtually, it was  exciting to see NUS staff, students, and representatives from partner organisations physically participate in this special forum to exchange knowledge, share experiences, and form collaborations on everything HPC.

Rikky Purbojati, our Head of HPC-AI, kicked off the session by sharing what NUS IT had achieved in supporting the high-performance computing and AI needs of NUS’ research community. For instance, HPC users can now request to add more quota to their workspace beyond 2TB for their research data storage service and there are more subscription models to provide computing resources through the Central HPC facility, thus enabling better research capabilities! Rikky also delved into the 2023 goals for the HPC-AI team which includes core modernisation (a tech refresh to replace older generation systems) and GPU Cluster Expansion (an expansion of HPC-AI facility with the latest generation GPU accelerators).

Learning takes place everywhere and as a testament to that, Ku Wee Kiat, our Associate Principal Engineer (HPC-AI), presented the key takeaways from attending the SuperComputing 2022(SC22) International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis at Dallas, Texas. He observed that much of the sharing at the conference alluded to the increasing overlap of HPC and AI as models / model architectures get larger and the HPC-AI community should hence consider leveraging better software support to handle hardware and software acceleration. He also delved into this topic in depth with more technical details.

Two external speakers were invited to share their thoughts with the community! Paul Hiew, a Senior Systems Manager from the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore, presented key points on HPC development in Singapore and gave us some exciting news – the Aspire2A supercomputing system will be publicly opened soon for the NUS community! Andi Ariffin from NovaGlobal, an AI and HPC company, shared about how to maximise HPC utilisation, by using software such as PBS Pro, Singularity, and NVIDIA MIG. He highlighted certain pain points and challenges that are commonly faced by research computing users, and how these software can help to alleviate the problems.

This event also presented an invaluable opportunity for everyone present to network with like-minded people and to form collaborations!

HPC is a niche and deeply specialised field, with rapidly moving technologies

and a diverse set of challenges and as such, it is essential to have an informal support structure. We are proud of the HPC team for enabling such a fantastic Community of Practice platform to bring together NUS staff, students and industry partners to learn and grow together as a community. See you again in 2023! 🎉🥳

#NUSIT #NUS_IT #HPC #AI #CommunityofPractice #sharing