Attempt to Salvage Multi-million Dollars of Ill-conceived HPC System Investment by Creating Academic Cloud Computing Infrastructure. A Tale of Errors and Belated Learning

In 2015 the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling (ICM), University of Warsaw built a modern datacenter and installed three substantial HPC systems as part of a 168 M PLN (36 M Euro) OCEAN project. Some of the systems were ill-conceived, badly architected and for the five years of their life span have brought minimal ROI. This paper reports on a two-year intensive effort to reengineer two of these HPC systems into a hybrid, multi-cloud solution called A-CHOICeM (Akademicka CHmura Obliczeniowa ICM). The intention was to expand the user base of ICM typical HPC system from around 200 to 500 to about 100,000 potential general academic users from all institutes of higher learning in the Warsaw area. The main characteristics of this solution are integration of on-premises ICM Cloud with several public cloud providers, building solution tailored to particular groups of academic users, containerization, integration of special computational paradigms like AI and Quantum Computing. Full process of designing the solution, competitive dialogue with suppliers, and full final specifications for the solution are presented. Several roadblocks, pitfalls and difficulties encountered along the way, including the conservative attitude of "the old school" HPC admins, University bureaucracy, national funding policies and others are presented.