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#THETA

2015

Bernard Meade

A/Prof Christopher Fluke

Prof Richard Sinnott

Dr Steven Manos

Dr Neil Killeen

Paul Mignone

Michael Wang

Seeing the Big Picture: A Digital

Desktop for Researchers

Fun facts for parties

• Large Synoptic Survey Telescope – 20TB/night, 60PB over ten years

• Australian Square Kilometer Array

Pathfinder (ASKAP) – 72TB/second (raw data stream)

– 120 million Blu-ray discs/day

• Square Kilometer Array – ~1EB/day (2x daily global Internet traffic)

– 100x LHC data collection

Screens vs Telescopes

Displays Resolution Image size (mp)

Standard desktop display 1680 x 1050 1.7

Full HD display 1920 x 1080 2.1

iPad (with Retina display) 2048 x 1536 3.1

Dell UltraSharp desktop display 2560 x 1600 4.1

Macbook Pro (2013) 2880 x 1800 5.2

4k UltraHD display 3840 x 2160 8.3

OzIPortal 15360 x 6400 98.3

Facility Image size (mp) Reference

HST Advanced Camera for Surveys 16 “ACS::The Advanced Camera for Surveys.” 2005.

http://acs.pha.jhu.edu/

Dark Energy Camera 520 Mohr, J. J., R. Armstrong, E. Bertin, G. E. Daues,

S. Desai, M. Gower, R. Gruendl, et al. 2012. “The

Dark Energy Survey Data Processing and

Calibration System.” arXiv Preprint

arXiv:1207.3189. http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.3189

Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam 870 “Hyper Suprime-Cam.” 2011.

http://www.naoj.org/Projects/HSC/index.html.

Tiled Display Walls

The 29566 x 14321 pixel Carina Nebula mosaic from Hubblesite.org, with OzIPortal

(15360x6400), Dell Ultrasharp (2560x1600) and Standard Desktop Display (1680x1050)

sizes overlaid.

Image credit: Bernard Meade 2013

Tiled Display Walls

A Tiled Display Wall is a collection of commodity screens arranged to provide a

unified display surface.

Image credit: Bernard Meade 2013

Large format displays in astronomy

• Astronomy often paraded as a best use

case

• Very few research cases to support this

• We found some

benefits

• Still marginal

value

proposition

The OptIPortal Tiled Display Wall

2014 – Tiled Display Wall experiment

Meade, Bernard F., Christopher J. Fluke, Steven Manos, and Richard O.

Sinnott. 2014. “Are Tiled Display Walls Needed for Astronomy?” Publications of

the Astronomical Society of Australia 31. doi:10.1017/pasa.2014.29.

Carina nebula image source: http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/nebula/pr2007016a/hires/true/

Large format displays in general

• People prefer using a TDW when

searching for small objects in large

image

• Physical navigation is better than virtual

navigation

• Overall performance is better with TDW

• 2 amateurs = 1 astronomer

• Can’t always see the forest for the trees

TDW Results – survey results

TDW Results – survey results (bezels)

UltraHD displays

• UltraHD (3840x2160) = 8.3mp

• No bezels

• <$1000

• Flat and Curved options

• 3D capable

• Compared to SDD and TDW, fits nicely

in between

TDW Results

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

• Desktop as a Service

• Application streaming

• >> VNC, X11 Forwarding or NX protocol

• ~5-50Mbps

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure - Benefits

• Escaping the “computer lifecycle”

• No more “compute for screensavers”

• A big machine when you need it, a little

machine when you don’t…

• VMs can keep chugging no matter what

you are doing, or where you are

• VDI can adjust to the current available

bandwidth – phone, laptop, desktop…

Infrastructure for remote collaboration

Image sources: https://www.aarnet.edu.au/images/uploads/resources/National_Map_August_2014.pdf,

http://www.nectar.org.au/sites/default/themes/nectar/logo-title.png

Melbourne Uni Monash

QCIF

eRSA

Pawsey

NCI

UTas

Intersect

National eResearch Collaboration Tools and

Resources (NeCTAR)

• Nearly 36,000 cores with 18,000

in use across more than 6,000

instances

• 5,600 user registrations

• Uptime of 99.9% across all

services

• IaaS

Source: http://status.rc.nectar.org.au/allocations/

Testing the nations research bandwidth

• Is VDI viable in Australia?

• Small files are ok, but what about big

files? What about LOTS of files?

• Skymapper NCI

• ASKAP Pawsey

• Gigabytes 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100,

200, 500, 1000

• Transfer to standard desktop on 1Gbps

at University of Melbourne

Transfer speeds

Daily data transfer speeds between the NCI and the University of Melbourne. There is little variability in the transfer times during the

week for each of the file sizes.

Transfer speeds - Comparison

Data transfer times to the University of Melbourne from NCI (grey) and Pawsey (black). In all cases, transfer time from Pawsey is

longer, and shows more variability.

Transfer speeds - Profile

Network profile for 1 GB transfers to the University of Melbourne from NCI and Pawsey.

Conclusion

• The age of Computing as a Utility is

nearly here

• Network stability is becoming more

important than bandwidth

• Sensor networks will need bandwidth

too

• Where will we be next year…?

• … in five years…?

• …in ten years…?

Thank you