The University of Utah’s Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) has focused on cost-effectively realizing and enabling the research computing needs for the University.
Today, CHPC does much more than HPC. CHPC also serves as an expert team to broadly support the diverse research computing needs on campus. These needs include support for big data, big data movement, data analytics, security, virtual machines, Windows science application servers, protected environments for data mining and analysis of protected health information, and advanced networking. CHPC has helped in facilitating projects such as 400 Gbps Science DMZ segments at both the University of Utah Downtown Data Center (DDC) and the 40-Gbps campus backbone, dynamic cluster and network provisioning, and software defined networks.
Currently in the University of Utah Downtown Data Center, CHPC manages over 35,000 cores (over 32,000 of these as compute cores on the HPC clusters) and over 22 PB of RAID configured spinning disks for NFS storage.
CHPC relies on Bareos to back up both physical and virtual systems to a Ceph cluster using S3 targets. Additionally, Bareos helps with the transition from manual tape backups to automated file system backups, a scalable setup addressing the needs of multi petabyte storage.
David Heidorn, Sr. System Administrator at University of Utah, Center for High Performance Computing:
With Bareos we have confidence that we can continue to scale our backups to meet our needs and have the reliability of a team that’s there to help us address any issues that might arise. I have had firsthand experience of this as the Bareos team works hard fixing issues during the COVID-19 pandemic.