Next steps

• Meet to review all options and confirm desired direction and expected timing.
• Review resources. Xiao-Qiu Ye has cluster experience, including set-up.

Draft idea

High-level overview

• Create a stand-along cluster using new hardware ($25K for minimum of 3 years operations (thus, ~$8K/yr in hardware)).
  • Uses new OS and related cluster management software.
  • Install and configure necessary applications.
  • Enable NetID-based access, if possible (limit 2-3 days for a "go/no-go" decision on this functionality)
• Confirm old nodes can successfully be added to that new cluster.
• Migrate users to new cluster.
• Migrate old nodes to new cluster.

Unknowns

• Time for install of all necessary applications, many of which are new to Lulu.
• Whether NetID-based access will succeed. But note that this is not a do-or-die step.

Tasks and estimated timing

Lulu becomes available ~mid-September?

See unknowns, above, which related to tasks which will obviously take additional time to accomplish.

Other ideas

• We can walk through rates and scenarios, as appropriate.

Buy cycles, on demand.

Good for irregular work, especially if have high peaks of need.

• Buy cycles from CAC (RedCloud, minimum of $400 for 8585 core*hours
  • 12 cores available at any one time on one system. Can access more than one system at a time, but systems are not linked.
  • $400 buys you 8585 core*hours, which is ~1 core for an entire year, non-stop.
  • For 96 cores, that's $38.4K for 1 year, non-stop.
    • 96 = 8 nodes, each with dual 6-core procs => 8 * 12 = 96
  • Or, for $25K, that's 53,656.2 cores*hours.
    • $25K = $400*62.5 units. And each unit is 8585 core*hours. So,

• Determine costs, processes, and trade-offs if use another cloud service, such as:
  • Amazon. AC3?
  • Google. Computer?

Table