HPC4AI@UNITO: A Use Case For Datacenter Digital Twin

The HPC4AI datacenter hosted at the Computer Science Department of the University of Turin was born to address the exponentially increasing computing needs of cross-disciplinary research on AI. To address the needs of modern AI, HPC4AI rethinks the traditional usage of Cloud and HPC systems where the Cloud provides a modern interface for HPC, and HPC serves as an accelerator for the cloud. To date, it has supported 40+ research projects across a broad range of domains, from astronomy and medicine to human sciences. Furthermore, it acts as an R&D platform to study, develop, and test new datacenter technologies. As such, it hosts a zoo of exotic computing platforms and the first prototype of two-phase evaporative server cooling. This work describes operating and managing HPC4AI with its challenges and lessons learned, with an analysis of key opportunities for digital twins.