“ARCHER Challenge” sneak peek

Since we are heading towards the end of our summer school I would like to give you a small preview of my project, the name of which is “ARCHER Challenge”, named after the UK National Supercomputing Service, located a few kilometers away from EPCC. For the development of the application for the popular web development technologies of  HTML, CSS, and Javascript were used, along with some important frameworks and libraries such as Bootstrap and  JQuery, respectively. In addition, we considered the “mobile first” implementation as a default layer to build on, according to the fundamental concepts of modern web designing.

Game target: it will be a race against time kind of game. The target will be to run as many supercomputing jobs (i.e. simulation of earth’s climate, extreme weather forecasting, aircraft research, etc.) as possible within a specific time frame.

Game rules:  The game has four levels referring to HPC centres: “Local”, “City”, “Regional”, and “National”. The player will start the game at the “Local” level and with a predetermined amount of money. As time passes and more jobs run on the supercomputer, the player will be able to unlock better computer components that will make the supercomputer faster and more efficient, reaching higher levels and acquire cool HPC badges!

Node Designer wizard.

Game Description: For reasons of simplicity, there will be four available cabinets and each cabinet will have up to three nodes. The player will choose one cabinet and the button “Add node” will appear, with which she/he can either select one of the predetermined nodes or make a custom node. In case of custom node, the player will be guided through a wizard to select in each step a CPU, a memory, and an accelerator.  The moment she/he buys a node the supercomputing jobs will start running, and she/he will earn some money every time a job is executed. There will also be an option to upgrade a node (i.e. buy more memory) or fix it, since in a supercomputing cluster the failure of nodes is a usual and expected thing!

mySuperNode added successfully!

Moreover, when the player reaches a higher level, the “Cabinet Settings” button will unlock. This option gives the player the chance to upgrade the cabinet’s cooling and interconnect systems. Since communication is an important part of a cluster,  a better interconnect system results in better performance. And of course, a better cooling system keeps the nodes’ temperature lower leading to less failures.

The pictures give a taste of how a user will be able to add a new node on the cabinets, but I wouldn’t want to provide more spoilers and reveal all the fun!

So have fun and as always,

Cheers from Edinburgh