Condominium Service
Condominium access is a major component of the HPC national service. A condominium share is a fractional allocation of the computing resources of the central national HPC system. A number of institutions are already using this approach on ICHEC’s existing Kay infrastructure to provide institutional access and are very satisfied with the model. In effect, a condo permits institutions to grant resources directly to their researchers as if it was a local cluster.
The full benefits of the condominium, shared services model can be summarised as follows:
In summary, the condominium model leads to significant savings in management and administrative overheads for the institutions and funding agencies alike. It represents a realistic and effective road map for the provision of high-end compute resources within a shared services framework for the national research community and in terms of locally-controlled access, it meets the objectives and needs of the HEIs.
It is also worth noting that this model was also strongly endorsed by panels of international experts convened by SFI as part of its mid-term review of ICHEC and by the HEA for its “Review of the Provision of High Performance Computing in Ireland”.
The Condominium Model from the HEIs’ and researchers’ perspective
While ICHEC operates the condo system as a seamless part of the complete cluster, ICHEC staff provides helpdesk and software provision to support condo users in the same way as if the users were accessing the national service. That said, ICHEC staff do not grant direct access to the condos. Each institution involved has a local point of contact for its researchers. These local contacts manage access to its condo.
Benefits
- The HEIs save on procurement overheads for the equipment.
- ICHEC's deal with the vendor provides the HEIs with a cluster at a significantly lower cost compared to buying similar equipment directly as a stand-alone system.
- ICHEC guarantees that the institution obtains its own institutional cluster, managed by highly experienced ICHEC staff; local human resources are not diverted to managing the cluster.
- For the HEIs, significant savings are also made on storage, as well as on the supporting infrastructure and software (management nodes, login nodes, interconnect, software licenses, etc.); these are purchased by ICHEC as part of the centralised service.
- Hosting and systems administration overheads are costed centrally leading to significant savings. Apart from the initial capital cost of the condo and storage, the only additional costs for the institution are the monthly electricity costs charged pro rata to the size of the condo.
- Central purchasing of up-to-date, tuned tools, libraries, application software lead to significant savings for HEIs who do not have responsibility for either purchasing or maintaining the software.
Condominium users are also entitled to hold national service project resources.
Usage
Mixing usage between both mechanisms is very straightforward. Jobs are submitted to the system via submission scripts in the normal way. A condo or project can provide the hours simply be changing the account following the -A directive to a project code or the condo code as listed in the above table e.g. using the University of Limerick Condo #SBATCH -A ul01
Requesting Access
To request access to your Institution's condominium, please contact your local Access Contact Point. You should also register for a central ICHEC account.
| Institution | Access Contact Point |
| Dublin City University | research.facilities@dcu.ie and cc sysops@dcu.ie |
| Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies | ichec@dias.ie |
| NUI Galway | Noreen Goggin |
| Maynooth University | Vanush Misha Paturyan |
| Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland | research-it@rcsi.com |
| Technological University Dublin | Stephen O'Sullivan |
| University College Dublin | Research IT Services |
| University of Limerick | Richard Cotterell |
