hpc-ch Forum: CHIPP Phoenix Life Cycle Management at CSCS

Last October EPF Lausanne, the University of Lausanne  and Vital-IT hosted a hpc-ch Forum on Hardware Life-Cycle and User Policies for HPC systems. As HPC service provider we are concerned with hardware lifecycle and usage policy. The management of aging hardware, setting rules for hardware renewal by balancing the energy efficiency and the users satisfaction, and the usage policies are human problems that affect our technical decisions.

The main questions we addressed during the forum were:

• What are your ways of managing hardware life cycle?
• How do you decide and proceed with purchases?
• What are the different allocation models you support (chargeback/showback/…)?
• How do you convince the users to get rid of obsolete and energy-consuming hardware?

In the next posts we will present the slidecasts of the different talks. We start with a presentation by George Brown (CSCS) on “Lifecycling of the Grid Phoenix Cluster”.