Initial Experiences from TUPAC Supercomputer

Abstract

High Performance Computing centers boost the development of a wide range of disciplines in Science and Engineering. The installation of public shared facilities in a country is an effort that should be carefully used and must be as open as possible to strengthen the impact of these resources.We describe the current status and characteristics of TUPAC super-computer, which is hosted by a CONICET research institute. Unlike other experiences in Argentina, TUPAC is focused on supporting external scientific and technological communities. In spite of having a reducedoperations staff, this machine provides computational resources and supports more than 200 external research projects.In this work we describe the supercomputer setup, tools and policies implemented to reach the level of efficiency needed to support this amount of projects. We also characterize jobs, users and projects with special emphasis on industrial applications and large computationalresearch initiatives hosted in TUPAC.