Monday the 31st of January the partnering Universities (AU, AAU, and SDU) met up for a workshop to take stock on the first year with UCloud – DeiC Interactive HPC.
One year of Interactive HPC
One year after going live, the effect and esteem of UCloud across national users can be (partly) analysed, and with more than 2,800 users, 30,000 jobs run and 400 projects started, it seems that UCloud has been well received and proven a welcome service for a wide range of users. Also, the numbers show, that DeiC Interactive HPC/UCloud is mainly being used during working hours as intended because of the interactive element of the platform.
Though three out of four users are affiliates of one of the three partner universities, a growing number of users from University of Copenhagen and Copenhagen Business School employ UCloud in their research.
Outreach will continue in order to gain more users from all the Danish universities, nonetheless UCloud has reached a considerable number of users – including many female users, which is normally a challenge for HPC systems.
Center Director, Claudio Pica
The new website interactivehpc.dk will also play a part in future outreach to ensure even more users in the years to come.
Future developments on UCloud
As an intuitive and interactive platform, UCloud was developed to assist and support researcher’s need for both computing and data management.
In general, the UCloud service support for users has been credited with high satisfaction rates, however, this is still an area with room for improvement.
Center Director, Claudio Pica
Future development of the service in terms of software and UCloud functionalities was thus a central focus of the agenda when the consortium met at the end of January to reflect on this first year’s outcome.
More specifically, the objective of the recent meeting was to discuss 1) improvement of the UCloud support 2) how to improve communication about UCloud on different platforms, and 3) how to develop the service, i.e. software and functionalities.
The national HPC landscape
Ambitions are high both in service support, development and documentation and the consortium will continue improving on UCloud and its accompanying services. UCloud also went through a major update (DeiC Project 5) in January 2022 preparing the platform to become the National Integration Portal.
DeiC Interactive HPC is part of a national HPC landscape, and all HPC facilities are now available except from Accelerated HPC, which is expected in 2022. The main objective of the landscape is to improve the e-infrastructure within Danish research and education.
The consortium behind DeiC Interactive HPC is a collaboration between Aalborg University Aarhus and University of Southern Denmark (SDU) including a partnership with The Royal Danish Library. Interactive HPC, was launched in the fall of 2020 with the purpose of encouraging and improving computing, storage, and network infrastructure across Danish education and research environments.
The HPC service UCloud, developed by the consortium, plays a decisive role for the consortium’s primary objective concerning the improvement of national e-infrastructure.
More workshops are planned in the near future, bringing the partnering universities SDU, Aalborg University and Aarhus University even closer together in their joint effort to provide the best research infrastructure across Danish and education and research environments.
