This week I had the opportunity to speak at the 2022 RMACC Symposium, hosted by my own institution, about the Alpine supercomputer. My presentation and the others from my CU colleagues are available here.
In summary, Alpine has been in production since our launch event in May. After some supply chain issues (the same that have affected the entire computing sector), we are preparing to bring another round of nodes online within weeks. That will put Alpine’s total available resources (about 16,000 cores) on par with those of the retiring Summit system. It’s an exciting step for us at CURC.
As for RMACC: I’ve never attended the symposium before. After three days, I came away with a lot of new information, new contacts, and ideas for how to support our researchers better. A few topics in particular I paid attention to:
- Better and more scalable methods of deploying HPC systems and software
- How the community will navigate the transition from XSEDE to ACCESS
- The companies, organizations, and universities (like mine!) building the future of this space
- Changes in business models for the vendors and commercial developers we work with
Academic HPC is a small niche in the computing world, and gatherings like this can be valuable as spaces to connect and share our best ideas.