Wynton is a large, shared computing cluster underlying UCSF’s Research Computing Capability, focusing on the High Performance Computing model. As the needs for computation power, and ever-larger data sets in medical and health research climbed sharply at UCSF, several existing large high-performance clusters realized the need to pool their resources – to share assets, better balance usage and give our researchers a world-class infrastructure for their studies. Today’s Wynton is the realization of this vision that was initially set in 2015. Workloads are balanced and managed across shared machines, using the Sun Grid Engine, logging, monitoring, a shared parallel file system, 10- to 40-Gb/s switches, and up-to-date CentOS Linux. The system is IT-certified for security of de-identified data. Centers participate using the “co-op” model of resource contribution and sharing. Wynton is also linked to the NSF-funded Pacific Research Platform, allowing sharing of large data assets and many computing profiles across 20 science centers on the West Coast.
With this initial release, plans have been drawn up for much more: more participating clusters, deeper tiers of security and privacy compliance and very large shared storage with Data Science profiles, to name a few. Stay tuned.
