Oguzhan Burak Tekin

Built an HPC cluster for interdisciplinary academic research at Sabanci University, Istanbul. I led the project to redesign and implement the HPC system based on the OpenHPC schemas.

To effectively use the existing hardware, I created a primarily virtual environment on Proxmox VE and selected an operating system based on Rocky Linux 8.6. I used technologies like Open vSwitch, SR-IOV, and VF with Infiniband HCAs, bonding, GPU computing, Ceph, BeeGFS, and BeeOND. I also implemented NVMe caching on storage tiers for improved IO performance and a metadata service with DRBD HA and pacemaker, going beyond regular networking and hardware boundaries. For the deployment of compute nodes and other functions, I used xCAT. Finally, I equipped the system with the latest versions of GNU, Intel, PGI Compilers, Python, R, OpenMPI stack, Slurm, Environment Modules, and Singularity. The system is monitored with dashboards in Grafana and XDMoD.

Researchers have access to the system over a security gateway with SSH or RDP. Now they can use the latest applications compiled from open-source code, containers, and commercial apps and visualize data on the HPC system without moving data back to their local environments.

As a solution consultant, I established the video surveillance of the International Port of Turkmenbashi. I designed the infrastructure of 12 data centers for video surveilling of an area of 1,200,000 square meters with more than 4,000 units of 8K cameras in QCIF format. When the project was signed, I organized the shipment of hardware, which consisted of more than 170 servers, 40 conventional storage systems, and 10PB parallel distributed storage to a fictive warehouse in Istanbul with a Lodz-Tilburg-Istanbul route. All of them were installed there to the last screw and then transferred from Istanbul to the final destination 3,500 km away in just four weeks to keep up with the project's deadline for a great opening, which leaders of multiple countries will attend.

The client requested an analysis of their HPC system to identify root causes that extended the time required to run HPC jobs. To understand HPC system performance, I implemented a dashboard to analyze throughput, IOPS, and metadata performance, ran thorough tests, and worked on necessary steps toward improvements.

The client was a prominent children's cancer research hospital running their research applications on Azure. They were using a 24-node BeeGFS parallel file system which was underperforming on Azure.

I reviewed configurations of the BeeGFS cluster and implemented necessary dashboards to monitor the storage system and identify the root cause of underperforming. After running the required performance tests, the root cause was identified. The server resources for the metadata system were not enough and caused saturation. The necessary advisory was provided to improve the performance long term.