TACC researchers paid a visit to the Deucalion supercomputer — and offered their insights on its operationalization

Willing to help and eager to learn. With this state of mind, John Cazes and Nick Thorne arrived in Portugal from the Texas Advanced Computing Centre (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin. With extensive experience in supercomputing and at a crucial moment in the operationalization of Deucalion, the two researchers praised the architecture of the new Portuguese supercomputer, emphasizing the ARM processor - suitable, for example, for machine learning techniques and protocols.

On Nick Thorne's side, as sysadmin, this was also an opportunity to explore how the MACC team implements the back-end hardware and how the control plane is set up. “There are no correct answers. Regarding system administration, we're facing a time of change, with much of the systems' performance coming from GPUs. This substantially benefits Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads, for example. We're also at a transition point from direct liquid cooling to CPU and GPU sockets, which will also bring impactful changes to systems.”

Despite continuous evolution and the lack of a magic formula, the two TACC researchers are confident about the unavoidable role that supercomputing will play in the future, especially in the light of machine learning - which requires the same hardware. 'Supercomputing has traditionally been used for simulations in physics and chemistry, experiments that can't be done in a laboratory. Only on supercomputers,' points out John Cazes.

The visit is another step in MACC's partnership, through the University of Minho and the UT Austin Portugal Program, with TACC - which has been going on for several years. One of the highlights was the BigHPC project, in which the MACC was a partner. According to John Cazes, the focus of the work was on creating an environment to support users through containers, which will be a big part of the future - since much of the software used in machine learning is made available through containers. The researcher was also excited about the prospect of the project, resulting in new partnerships. 'I hope so!' said John Cazes.