Halcyon: Unified HPC Center Operations

Abstract

Under a shared campus cluster model, with many research groups investing distinct amounts and annual new hardware acquisitions, management of users and resources can become very complex. At Purdue, the Research Computing division set out in 2011 to design a cluster management solution to empower faculty to manage access to their own purchased resources. This system needed to also allow center staff to quickly provision resources, provide accurate accounting and tracking of faculty purchases over time, and provide a single location for data about the cluster program [1].