The fifth white paper prepared by our SRA team is out, and it is dedicated to the technical implications for HPC of supporting urgent decisions. Many thanks to the authors:
- Manolis Marazakis (FORTH – Greece)
- Marc Duranton (CEA – France)
- Dirk Pleiter (KTH – Sweden)
- Giuliano Taffoni (INAF – Italy).
- Hans-Christian Hoppe (Scapos AG – Germany)
Note: the full collection of papers published by ETP4HPC is also available in the Zenodo open access repository, in the ETP4HPC community.
Emerging use cases from incident response planning and broad-scope European initiatives (e.g. Destination Earth, European Green Deal and Digital Package) are expected to require federated, distributed infrastructures combining computing and data platforms. These will provide elasticity enabling users to build applications and integrate data for thematic specialisation and decision support, within ever shortening response time windows.
For prompt and, in particular, for urgent decision support, the conventional usage modes of HPC centres is not adequate: these rely on relatively long-term arrangements for time-scheduled exclusive use of HPC resources, and enforce well-established yet time-consuming policies for granting access. In urgent decision support scenarios, managers or members of incident response teams must initiate processing and control the resources required based on their real-time judgement on how a complex situation evolves over time. This circle of clients is distinct from the regular users of HPC centres, and they must interact with HPC workflows on-demand and in real-time, while engaging significant HPC and data processing resources in or across HPC centres.
This white paper considers the technical implications of supporting urgent decisions through establishing flexible usage modes for computing, analytics and AI/ML-based applications using HPC and large, dynamic assets.
