And that was the year that was. 2011 was an extremely interesting and successful year for ICTS HPC. After the establishment of a micro cluster we saw an enthusiastic uptake by researchers, culminating in over 20 users and just over 114,000 hours of real computations. Numerous scientific applications were ported to cluster format and several interesting compilation and coding challenges overcome. Our cluster increased from 12 to 136 cores and our memory footprint from 12GB 300GB of RAM. We are aware of at least 2 upcoming citations for usage and are looking forward to many more in 2012.
Our Grid offering suffered slightly this year, however we're hoping to get this sorted early in the first quater of 2012. In fact there are a number of exciting challenges and opportunities we're hoping to address in 2012 including more storage, an increase in CPUs, Grid integration, GPU computing etc. Apart from the hardware compliment we will also be looking at providing a more intuitive method of submitting HPC jobs via a web interface, uploading of data via a web based file manager and making use of central authentication mechanisms for our headnode. The UCT e-Research portal should start surfacing in 2012 which will gather all of UCT's HPC offerings into a single easily accessible area.
We'll have our roadmap for 2012/13 up in a week or two.
