Building a High Performance Computing Infrastructure for Novosibirsk Scientific Center

Abstract

Novosibirsk Scientific Center (NSC), also known worldwide as Akademgorodok, is one of the largest Russian scientific centers hosting Novosibirsk State University (NSU) and more than 35 research organizations of the Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences including Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics (BINP), Institute of Computational Technologies (ICT), and Institute of Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Geophysics (ICM&MG). Since each institute has specific requirements on the architecture of the computing farms involved in its research field, currentiy we've got several computing facilities hosted by NSC institutes, each optimized for the particular set of tasks, of which the largest are the NSU Supercomputer Center, Siberian Supercomputer Center (ICM&MG), and a Grid Computing Facility of BINP. Recendy a dedicated optical network with the initial bandwidth of 10 Gbps connecting these three facilities was built in order to make it possible to share the computing resources among the research communities of participating institutes, thus providing a common platform for building the computing infrastructure for various scientific projects. Unification of the computing infrastructure is achieved by extensive use of virtualization technologies based on XEN and KVM platforms. The solution implemented was tested thoroughly within the computing environment of KEDR detector experiment which is being carried out at BINP, and foreseen to be applied to the use cases of other HEP experiments in the upcoming future.