English

Expanding IceCube GPU computing into the Clouds

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 2021-11-02 v1

Abstract

The IceCube collaboration relies on GPU compute for many of its needs, including ray tracing simulation and machine learning activities. GPUs are however still a relatively scarce commodity in the scientific resource provider community, so we expanded the available resource pool with GPUs provisioned from the commercial Cloud providers. The provisioned resources were fully integrated into the normal IceCube workload management system through the Open Science Grid (OSG) infrastructure and used CloudBank for budget management. The result was an approximate doubling of GPU wall hours used by IceCube over a period of 2 weeks, adding over 3.1 fp32 EFLOP hours for a price tag of about $58k. This paper describes the setup used and the operational experience.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2107.03963,
  title  = {Expanding IceCube GPU computing into the Clouds},
  author = {Igor Sfiligoi and Shava Smallen and Frank Würthwein and Nicole Wolter and David Schultz and Benedikt Riedel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.03963},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

2 pages, 2 figures, to be published in proceedings of eScience 2021

R2 v1 2026-06-24T04:00:38.540Z