Interview with Hurricane early users Todd Bianco and Garrett Apuzen-Ito.

HPC: I am sitting here with Dr. Garrett Apuzen-Ito, and one of his students, Todd Bianco, from the Department of Geology and Geophysics. Todd is a 2006 Engagement Grant recipient and one of the first users of Hurricane, the newly deployed open use cluster at MHPCC. Todd and Garrett study the formation of hot spot volcanoes using supercomputers.

HPC: Have you used MHPCC resources before?

Todd: No, not even SQUALL.

HPC: Have you used other HPC resources before?

Todd: Only our local cluster. It is a department cluster with 30 dual nodes; 60 processors altogether. It is a Dell/Aspen hybrid.

HPC: How difficult was it to get your account on Hurricane? What steps did you take?

Todd: It was fairly easy. I followed the instructions on the MHPCC website, which I accessed through www.hawaii.edu/hpc, filling out the online form for the account. We had a well-defined project, which made it simple. Then we waited to hear from MHPCC. The whole process took a little more than one week. The project PI, Garrett Apuzen-Ito, had to apply for an account as well.

HPC: How do you communicate with Hurricane?

Todd: We use OpenSSH to communicate with Hurricane. We had to install a newer version, however. The older version gave us an error, and it took us a little while to determine that the old version was the problem.

HPC: Do you ever use the MHPCC Help Desk?

Todd: I submitted questions to the email help@mhpcc.hpc.mil, especially at the beginning. Sometimes it took awhile to get the issue resolved.

HPC: What are some of the issues you had in transferring to Hurricane?

Todd: I had to change from Linux to AIX. There are subtle differences that I was not aware of. For example, the "make" command in Linux is "gmake" in AIX, if you want to use the GNU compiler. In all, it took three weeks to get my code up and running on Hurricane. Also, my code did not recognize the same text identifiers that Linux did. Like "skip that line" identifiers that had to be changed. So I had to do extensive debugging.

HPC: Did you have to complete a National Agency Check (NAC) to get your account?

Todd: No. That's one reason it was so easy.

HPC: But you did have to transfer all your data over to the Hurricane system, didn't you?

Todd: We transferred just the code to Hurricane and that was easy. But we have to transfer the data off Hurricane after calculating, for local post-processing, with the scp command (secure copy), which is very slow. It sometimes takes more than an hour to transfer the data from a single calculation (gigabytes of data).

HPC: In starting to use the system, was there online help available?

Todd: The "getting started" page was fairly detailed.

HPC: Describe what it's like to work on Hurricane after working on your local cluster.

Todd: It's been great, but now there are a lot of users on Hurricane. There is no queuing system at present, so someone could actually use all the nodes. Shared nodes would be nice. As Hurricane gets busier, we plan to migrate to JAWS, probably in the fall.

Note from HPC: At the time of this publishing, Todd and Garrett have transferred their work to JAWS. Also, a reserved queue time has been established on Hurricane for the academic users (Mon - Fri, 8 am - 12 noon), to relieve some of the queueing burden for those with shorter jobs.