Software News

Over 240,000 CHTC Jobs Hit Record Daily Capacity Consumption

November 9, 2022

The Center for High Throughput (CHTC) users continue to be hard at work smashing records with high throughput computational workloads. On October 20th, more than 240,000 jobs completed that day, reporting a total consumption of more than 710,000 core hours. This is equivalent to the capacity of 30,000 cores running non-stop for 24 hours.

What is contributing to these records? One factor likely is UW’s investment in new hardware. UW-Madison’s research computing hardware recently underwent a substantial hardware refresh, adding 207 new servers representing over 40,000 “batch slots” of computing capacity.

However, additional capacity requires researchers ready and capable to use it. The efforts of the CHTC facilitation team, led by Christina Koch, contributed to this readiness. Since September 1, CHTC’s Research Computing Facilitators have met with 70 new users for an introductory consultation, and there have been over 80 visits to the twice-weekly drop-in office hours hosted by the facilitation team. Koch notes that “using large-scale computing can require skills and concepts that are new to most researchers - we are here to help bridge that gap.”

Finally, the hard work of the researchers themselves is another linchpin to these records. Over 80 users that span many fields of science contributed to this success, including these users with substantial usage:

  • Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory: an observatory operated by University of Wiconsin-Madison, designed to observe the cosmos from deep within the South Pole ice.
  • ECE_miguel: In the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Joshua San Miguel’s group explores new paradigms in computer architecture.
  • MSE_Szlufarska: Isabel Szlufarska’s lab focuses on computational materials science, mechanical behavior at the nanoscale using atomic scale modeling to understand and design new materials.
  • Genetics_Payseur: Genetics professor Bret Payseur’s lab uses genetics and genomics to understand mechanisms of evolution.
  • Pharmacy_Jiang: Pharmacy professor Jiaoyang Jiang’s interests span the gap between biology and chemistry by focusing on identifying the roles of protein post-translational modifications in regulating human physiological and pathological processes.
  • EngrPhys_Franck: Jennifer Franck’s group specializes in the development of new experimental techniques at the micro and nano scales with the goal of providing unprecedented full-field 3D access to real-time imaging and deformation measurements in complex soft matter and cellular systems.
  • BMI_Gitter: In Biostatistics and Computer Sciences, Anthony Gitter’s lab conducts computational biology research that brings together machine learning techniques and problems in biology
  • DairyScience_Dorea: Joao Dorea’s Animal and Dairy Science group focuses on the development of high-throughput phenotyping technologies.

Any UW student or researcher who wants to utilize high throughput of computing resources towards a given problem can harness the capacity of the CHTC Pool.

Users can sign up here