Driving a Petascale HPC Center with Octoshell Management System

Abstract

Running any computing center is a complex task. With the growth of scales and costs such tasks become challenges. So the top supercomputer sites, being big in everything, have always required special approaches to manage, to control, and to take care of them. At present, large HPC centers can have a variety of totally diverse systems containing up to millions of components, having thousands of users worldwide with the full range of complicated applications. Obviously, tons of data have to be managed in a concerted way to allow such an informational factory functioning. This paper shares the design principles, some implementation details and the roadmap vision regarding the Octoshell HPC center management system, which has been developed and is currently being used in the everyday practice of Moscow State University supercomputer center. This open source system manages Lomonosov and Lomonosov-2 systems with a total of over 5 PFlops peak performance complexes at present, providing multiple tools aimed to tackle most typical workflow tasks both for regular users and system administrators in a single shell.