HPCCF Strategic Draft

HPCCF Strategic Draft available for comments

 

The High-Performance Computing Core Facility Strategic Working Group (2023) has developed an early draft of recommendations, and we ask for your feedback to advance the conversation around HPC needs and plans for the campus.  Feedback can be submitted in a number of ways, and information received by August 31, 2023 is most helpful to guiding additional discussion and revision.

Please read the Strategic draft here:

Provide feedback via these options:

BACKGROUND

In January 2023, Associate Vice Chancellor, Cristina Davis, charged a HPCCF Strategic Working Group with providing a concise roadmap to guide campus leadership in investment decisions in high-performance computing.  The Strategic Working Group was asked to provide input as a clear and succinct articulation of the broad goals and tactics to deliver high-impact computing capabilities to meet current and emerging research needs through the HPC Core Facility over 3, 5, and 10-year timeframes.  The members of the Strategic Working Group were drawn from internal stakeholders and external colleagues from peer institutions, industry, and a national laboratory, and co-chaired by Titus Brown and Isabelle Girard.

The Strategic Working Group dedicated intense effort through 6 meetings over 12 weeks from January through March 2023.  In addition, members of the group met with various campus units, including ACCD, Committee on Research, HPCCF FAC, and the Office of Research leadership to further refine and expand the recommendations.  The SWG recommended a coordinated model for a robust campus HPC environment that manages infrastructure and shared resources in a collaborative, transparent, and strategic manner.  The SWG outlined three main aims with multiple activities to achieve the mission and vision of providing all researchers with ready access to a top-tier R1 computing environment that enables current research, supports cutting-edge future research, and enables UC Davis to win national-scale funding for a wide range of projects requiring computational research.  The HPCCF Strategic Working Group also recognized the requirement to develop recommendations in the context of researcher, administrator, and leadership priorities.  Hence, the group embraced a mission and vision and developed an initial set of recommendations to be reviewed and revised through additional stakeholder engagement.  The draft recommendations included here should be considered as a framework for further discussion with the final report to be delivered in September 2023, following a comprehensive evaluation by the high-performance community.