Applicability of Baseline Configuration Policies to Emerging Architectures

At a joint meeting of the HPCMP User Advocacy Group (UAG) and Baseline Configuration Team (BCT) in Lorton, VA on 11 March 2020, The HPCMP Associate Director for HPC Centers posed a series of questions to both groups regarding three emerging architectures in the HPCMP:

  1. HPC in the Cloud
    1. How can users interact with both the HPCMP and Cloud environments?
    2. Are BC/consistency policies applicable to the Cloud?
  2. Highly Classified HPC
    1. What are the user requirements for these systems?
    2. What has been the impact to users resulting from fewer unclassified resources?
    3. How will we allocate these systems?
    4. Do we apply BC/consistency policies to these systems?
  3. Data-Intensive/Deployable HPC
    1. What allocation unit shall we use for these systems?
    2. Do we apply BC/consistency policies to these systems?

During the spring and summer months of 2020 the BC Team discussed these questions in its weekly meetings, specifically the sub-questions relating to BC/consistency policies applicable to emerging architectures.

On December 30, 2020, BC Team submitted to the HPCMP Associate Director for HPC Centers a report on the applicability of each BC policy to the following three emerging architectures:

  • HPC Cloud Computing,
  • Highly Classified HPC Implementations,
  • Deployable Containerized HPC Implementations.

The BC Team report will be provided upon request.