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System overview criteria

Fit to programme

This task has been identified by the working groups as part of the agenda behind WP 1.3.

The task number is 001.

Description

Many universities in the UK host HPC testbeds and test nodes within their organisation. Notably ExCALIBUR has enabled the UK community to acquire quite a healthy set of such testbeds. A description can be found at the old ExCALIBUR site. Unfortunately, there are no guidelines of what a good system description should look like.

We think that descriptions at least should enlist the type of hardware and how to get access, but there is a lot of additional information that one could and maybe should provide. This miniproject shall collect ideas from various places and consortium members of what a good testbed description looks like:

  • What information do we expect testbeds to provide, i.e. what is the minimum info?
  • Can we provide some examples of really good system descriptions? Would a good system description for example provide some information on the precise hardware topology such as cache topology?
  • What information beyond the system description should a testbed page offer? For example, do we expect a good site to present data for a certain type of benchmarks (e.g. Stream, MPI tests, …)?

Projects tackling this task obviously might want to go beyond a sole collection of these criteria and use the resources to pimp their own testbe descriptions accordingly. However, the major outcome for SHAREing is the curation of a checklist that other system providers can follow when they start to write down what their system is and offers. They should be able to run through this checklist, knowing that if they provide this information as indicated by the checklist, they will have created a high-quality description of their kit.

Outcomes

  • Checklist of what information a good testbed description provides.
  • Publication of this checklist on the SHAREing webpage.