Models for a sustainable NGS University Resources and fEC Peter Clarke Feb 22th 2007 NeSC and Academic Director of ECDF (Edinburgh Compute and Data Facility)

Costs of Research Computing in Universities Obvious Elements to be covered Power and Environment = 20% Systems Staff = 40% Depreciation = 40% Other less obvious elements Service evolution Scalable and continuous requirements capture Middleware /software services Training and education (enabling efficient use of services) Software development (advancing code base technology)

What university research users need Baseline free at point of access service This has no guarantees but is available to all researchers Pre fEC grants Speculative nobel prize winning work Research without traditional research grants (e.g. humanities) Guaranteed Resource service This will guarantee a certain resource against agreed costs For specific projects with specific needs and funding sources Essential to be able to "commit" to a project Essential to obtain fEC costs from RCs

What university research users need (2) Agility Service LevelCapability

What University /School /Department finance probably believe Computing is like any other commodity (paper clips, animal houses) Researchers will be able to pay for everything they use from grants at 100% (=80%) immediately now there is fEC in place

The Disjoint Researchers don’t have mindset to pay full costs It has to be cheaper than I think it will cost me to roll my own My dept doesn’t charge me for power and my postdoc runs the system I don’t want to loose flexibility Im not sure central services will give me what I want Research councils havn't fully assimilated this in practice Peer bodies may still not have bought in fully to the real consequences of fEC Owning computer means its in RC control. Still talk of "University contribution" Finance Not all research use of computing can get a grant to pay costs in advance - and we don’t even want this to be the case. It is against the Universities research mission for this to be the case. Finance often groups don’t understand this.

In my opinion we are in danger of an unintended consequence of fEC on a major scale - I.e. decimation of legitimate access to computing for research for a few years.

My own model (1) Any research led University must provide a baseline free at point of access service if it is serious about research excellence Agile local Computing access is like a phone - would we really want to say you cant make a phone call if you don’t have a DA cost on a grant to pay the call charge ? - Would we want to inhibit access to library on same basis ?. It should ideally be paid for via an indirect cost rolled up with other such research support like libraries. This could be agreed with RCs If not is must be an agreed DA cost on all grants (possibly weighted according to discipline) The University must then provide a way to channel those funds to support this ! It is not very expensive to provide this within a University spread across all its research

My own model (2) Any research led University may provide a chargeable guaranteed resource service as part of the hierarchical agility-capability pyramid. It must be paid for as a DA cost on grants It must have auditable service level delivery It will inevitably appear to be much more expensive than the baseline service. We all have to understand this. It must be discounted heavily over a 5 year transition period to fEC to match the practicalities of transition. See example =>

My own model (3) Everyone must get away from the outdated idea that they have to own the hardware to provide the service, or to be a great University. We are all happy with the virtualisation/devolvement of networks - why not TBytes or CPU-cycles? Its all about virtualising - and raising the dotted line What is important is to provide the service the research community needs at a sensible price. If this means ACME-storgae PLC can provide the actual TBytes then so be it. You could imagine a PowerGen Scottish Power User relation This applies probably to TBytes and commodity CPU cycles in near term This probably doesn’t apply to specialist HPC use in very near term

My vision: The dotted line will rise The Internet Computers & Storage Virtualised Computing Services Scientific Data, Applications & Knowledge Discovery Researchers will learn not to care where resources are - same as they don’t care about the network now

Relation to National Services I (now) see no conflict For HPC There is a clear separation of need for Campus scale National Scale resources. National services are already paid for realistically. Campus service just need to fit in on on open market. For commodity computing and storage There is no plan to fund masses of this centrally via JISC NGS role is not to provide free computing for all (nor could it) NGS provides much more important things. !! So I now don’t think a free NGS undermines campus sustainablity But this is worthy of debate The more important question is what should NGS do so that JISC/RCs/Institutes will be happy to fund it in the way they do SuperJANET

…my list A baseline hardware service To set standard For evolution of service For development by users Defining a common standard for federating University resources Software certification, development, deployment planning Distributed community support Aggregation of requirements across Institutes Access to specialist services which it would be stupid to provide at each site Helpdesk ….. and more…. We live in a federated world