Halcyon: Unified HPC Center Operations

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. As operations at Purdue expanded, the internal portal evolved and took on many aspects of the operation of an HPC center beyond resource allocation and management. Eventually, components included HPC and storage resource management, user management and authorization, customer relationship, communications, documentation, and ordering/purchasing. Halcyon reconstitutes these in a modular, extensible framework to allow for the growth and maintenance necessary to encompass all aspects of HPC center management. This will allow centers to operate not only more efficiently, but more effectively, and deliver better services to researchers.