Trestles: a high-productivity HPC system targeted to modest-scale and gateway users

Trestles is a new 100TF HPC resource at SDSC designed to enhance scientific productivity for modest-scale and gateway users within the TeraGrid. This paper discusses the Trestles hardware and user environment, as well as the rationale for targeting this user base and the planned operational policies and procedures to optimize scientific productivity, including a focus on turnaround time in addition to the traditional system utilization. A surprisingly large fraction of TeraGrid users run modest-scale jobs (e.g.