i2Basque manages Euskalmet's iDataPlex

Great news: i2basque advertises the availability of the -possibly- already announced Euskalmet's iDataplex 1064 cores machine. This is indeed great news: i2basque from my point of view, can provide the best academic and industrial connectivity and therefore the best integration in all terms. If the machine it is hosted at the EJIE data center, then we can clearly say that it is probably one of the most uptime-d scientific computing clusters around.

Now we are only missing a bit more of coordination in the next purchases, so we get better hardware and cheaper. Possibly if this was more orchestrated, we could also start some sort of research in this area, get hardware previews, coordinate software development and support, partnership. We got all the elements, do not get me wrong, but they do not seem so visible.

Whoever takes this responsibility for our community has a great task ahead.
i2basque seems the candidate, lets see how this evolves.

Euskalmet, Ejie and iDataplex

A year since we heard about the first idataplex installation for Euskalmet.

However not much has been published since. Today, I just found an article in spanish that says that the system counts with 128 computing nodes, 6 management nodes and a total number of 1,072 procs.

But that is all folks...!

i2Basque, the Natural Coordinator

And I say this becoz this is the aim of Josu Aramberri who has been leading and coordinating this academic network project for the last period.

Josu and his excellent team have deployed a powerful and extremely valuable network using high end Juniper components that connect practically the total amount of centers and companies in the science, research and education sphere in the Basque.

They also provide High End Computing resources: a newest called gt3, the old gt, and the development one ft.

Although they seem to be used it is not clear by whom: it is most probably used by certain researchers in the academic arena like the Basque Centre for Applied Mathematics.

From my point of view their role is critical and of an incredible value for our system. Nonetheless, having said this, my point of view is that i2Basque should be granted more power to coordinate all the spread high end machines that are growing in the area. My point of view is that they have good and well linked personnel to help HPC projects grow. I would rather enable these guys to turn themselves into a CIC centre and start doing and transferring research and technology.