Workshop on Risk Management Techniques and Practice for HPC Centers

On September 17 and 18, managers and key staff from high performance computing centers (HPCC) across the globe arrived in San Francisco, Calif. for a DOE workshop on risk management techniques and practice. Participants discussed current and emerging techniques, practices, and lessons learned for effectively identifying, understanding, managing, and mitigating risks associated with acquiring leading-edge computing systems at HPCCs.

“High-performance computing, by its very nature, is an exercise in multi-level risk management,” says William Kramer, General Manager at NERSC and a member of the workshop organizing committee. “Every aspect of stewarding HPCCs into the petascale era, from identification of the program drivers to the details of procurement actions and simulation environment component deployments, represents unprecedented challenges and requires effective risk management.”

Kramer notes that the fundamental purpose of this workshop was to go beyond risk management processes and learn how to weave effective risk management practices, techniques, and methods into all aspects of migrating HPCCs into the next generation of leadership computing systems and to develop risk portfolios and approaches that apply specifically to
Petascale computing. This workshop was a follow-up of the Petascale System Integration workshop hosted by NERSC last year.

Bill Kramer and NERSC are also organizing a Birds of a Feather meeting on the topic of Petascale System deployment at the SC08 conference in November.