HPC and research infrastructure need reworking, says new roadmap | Australia | iTnews | Apr 2022
ioi_ab's bookmarks 2022-04-08
Summary:
"Australia’s research sector needs more investment in making high performance computing (HPC) more available and equitable, according to the ten-year 2021 National Research Infrastructure Roadmap. As one of its eight recommendations, the roadmap, published by the Department of Education, Skills and Employment on Thursday, also calls for a new national digital research infrastructure strategy.
The roadmap said the strategy should apply to digital research infrastructure that’s of significance, scale, complexity, or cost that’s beyond any single institution to operate. Since the 2016 NRI roadmap was published, continuing exponential data acquisition and storage, the growth of AI and ML, broader use of HPC, and the growth in open science require a new digital research infrastructure, the roadmap said....
The roadmap also calls for a shake-up of Australia’s research HPC capabilities.
Its key criticisms of the current state of affairs are that Australia’s two Tier-1 facilities – the Pawsey Centre in Western Australia and the ANU’s National Computational Infrastructure – can be difficult to access due to strong demand; and while institutions have developed their own Tier-2 facilities in response, these too are not always widely available.
Similarly, the roadmap noted that national access to GPU clusters, important for AI research and applications, “is not currently equitable, inhibiting technology innovation”.
It suggests cloud computing, both non-commercial and commercial, could help address access to HPC.
Other key aspects of the report’s digital research infrastructure requirements include treating software as national research infrastructure; and development of digital skills.
A coordinated national digital research infrastructure is needed, the report stated: “Coordinated planning across the ecosystem is also necessary to address emerging challenges and opportunities such as exascale computing where the computing, data and software infrastructure must evolve and grow together to ensure no one component lags behind”...."