PI: Associate Prof. Michele Della Morte, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, SDU
Co-Pi: Associate Prof. Benjamin Jäger, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, SDU
Though supercomputers form the key basis of postdoc Tobias Tsang’s research, UCloud has been a valuable, complementary tool for him and his colleagues and will most likely continue to be so in future work as well.
“I don’t think UCloud will ever be the only resource we use. But this is also the design of it; UCloud is not meant to be a huge machine, it is meant to be an available resource that is easy to use and that gives you a playground to set up things really from scratch where you can test things out and run smaller jobs and analyses. In that sense, it is quite complementary to a lot of the things we normally work with. For exploratory studies and for code testing, UCloud will definitely remain very useful.”
Postdoc Tobias Tsang
At one specific project, “One Flavour QCD as an analogue computer for SUSY”[1], done at SDU as a collaboration between CP3-Origins ( Centre for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology) and IMADA (Department of Mathematics and Computer Science), the vast majority of samples were generated on UCloud, and a significant amount of data production and measurements were also carried out on there. UCloud needs, however, to be considered a part of a whole, according to Tobias:
“It is not that one particular machine made it possible; we would otherwise have found another machine to run it on. But UCloud provided us with a nice set up where we could just use local resources without having to go through big grant applications to get computer time.”
Postdoc Tobias Tsang
Tobias stresses the interaction with the UCloud front office as a major benefit that has helped the research group significantly, especially compared to other clusters with a much longer response time:
“One of the nice things with UCloud as a general system is that every time something didn’t work, we got a really quick email back. Any questions we raised were answered quickly, so it was never something that kept us stuck for weeks or months – typically things were resolved in a very timely time scale. And things that we actively suggested as nice features or things that we thought were missing on UCloud were likewise addressed.“
Postdoc Tobias Tsang
[1] Della Morte, Jaeger, Sannino, Tsang and Ziegler, “One Flavour QCD as an analogue computer for SUSY”, PoS LATTICE2021 (2022) 225, https://doi.org/10.22323/1.396.0225
