TARA: A Year in Review

Putt Sakdhnagool, Manaschai Kunaseth, Apivadee Piyatumrong, Chompoonut Rungnim, Viwan Jarerattanachat, Wirote Udomsiripinij, Kittithorn Tharatipayakul, Takdanai Suwan, Piyawut Srichaikul

Abstract

In 2018, National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) has initiated a national project to establish National Science and Technology Infrastructure (NSTI) to enabling advanced scientific research and development in Thailand. As a result, the TARA cluster has been deployed and operated by NSTDA Supercomputer Center (ThaiSC) since February 2019. The cluster is a heterogeneous cluster with a theoretical peak performance of 500 teraflops. The key mission of TARA is to support large-scale computing demand from wide range of computational science applications in Thailand. In this paper, we describe the detailed cluster information and service operation of TARA cluster in the past year including the design criteria, hardware specification, management, and user support and experience. We also discuss about the challenges we encountered, and lesson learned from these experiences.