New Mexico Computing Application Center Infrastructure

PROJECT MANAGEMENT PLAN
(PMP)

Executive Sponsor - Roy Soto, Cabinet Secretary, Department of Information Technology
Business Owner - Thomas Bowles, Science Advisor to Governor Richardson
Project Manager – Nicolas Behrmann, PMP,
Original Plan Date: Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Revision Date: Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Revision: 1.1

Project Areas Yet to be Determined

Dependent upon contract and work with vendor

2.3.2 Product Deliverable Documents

2.4 Work Break Down Structure – project tasks

3.4 Product Life Cycle Approach

3.5 Technical Strategy

4.3 Project Team

5.1 Staffing and Acquisition

5.5 Risk Management

5.7 Scope Management

5.7.1 Issue management

5.7.2 Change Management

5.8 Project Timeline

5.9 Project Budget

5.13Configuration Management for project documents

6.2 Contract Close

Dependent upon negotiation with NMCAC Committees

2.3. Deliverable Approval Authority Designation and acceptance procedures

5.5 Risk Management

5.7 Scope Management

5.7.1 Issue management

5.7.2 Change Management

5.10 Communications Plan

5.12 Quality Objectives and Control

table of contents

Project Areas Yet to be Determined

Dependent upon contract and work with vendor

Dependent upon negotiation with NMCAC Committees

Revision History

About This Document

1.0 Project Overview

2.0 Scope

2.1 Project Justification

2.2 Project Objectives

2.2.1 Business Objectives

2.2.2 Technical Objectives

2.3 Deliverables

2.3.1 Project Management Deliverables

2.3.2 Product Deliverables

2.3.3 Deliverable Approval Authority Designations

2.3.4 Deliverable Acceptance Procedure

2.4 Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

3.0 Overall Strategy

3.1 Project Management Life Cycle

3.1.1 PMI Project Processes

3.2 Critical Success Factors

3.3 Project Logistics

3.4 Project Product Life Cycle Model

3.5 Technical Strategy

4.0 Project Organization

4.1 New Mexico Computing Application Center Advisory Committee

4.2 Administrative Stakeholders representing the State of New Mexico

4.3 rfp evaluation Committee

4.4 Technical Review Committee

4.5 Acceptance Evaluation Committee

4.6 Project Governance Model

4.7 project team roles and responsibilities

4.2 Customers

4.3 Project Team

4.3.1 Project Team Organizational Breakdown Structure

4.3.2 Project Team Roles and Responsibilities

5.0 Project Management and Controls

5.1 Staffing Planning and Acquisition

5.2 Assumptions

5.3 Constraints

5.4 Dependencies

5.4.1 Mandatory Dependencies

5.4.2 Discretionary Dependencies

5.4.3 External Dependencies

5.5 Risk Management

5.5.1 Risk Management Strategy

5.5.2 Project Risk Identification

5.5.3 Project Risk Analysis

5.5.3.1 Target Date of Verification and Validation, Benchmarking

5.5.3.2 Limited Number of Responding Vendors

5.5.3.2 Limited technical expertise to support project

5.5.3.2 On-Site supervision

5.5.4 Project Risk Mitigation Approach

5.5.5 Risk Reporting and Escalation Strategy

5.5.6 Project Risk Tracking Approach

5.6 Independent Verification and Validation - IV&V

5.6.1 Technical validation and verification- QA Team

5.6.2 Project management validation and verification

5.7 Scope Management Plan

5.7.1 Issue Management

5.7.1.1 Internal Issue Escalation and Resolution Process

5.7.1.2 External Issue Escalation and Resolution Process

5.7.2 Change Control

5.7.2.1 Change Control Process

5.7.2.2 Change Control Board (CCB)

5.8 Project Timeline

5.9 Project Budget

5.9.1 Budget Tracking

5.10 Communication Plan

5.10.1 Communication Matrix

5.10.2 Status Meetings

5.10.3 Project Status Reports

5.11 Performance Measurement (Project Metrics)

5.11.1 Baselines

5.11.2 Metrics Library

5.12 Quality Objectives and Control

5.12.1 Customer Satisfaction

5.12.2 Deliverable Definition

5.12.3 Deliverable Quality

5.12.4 Project/Product Deliverable Presentation

5.13 Configuration Management

5.13.1 Version Control

5.13.2 Project Repository (Project Library)

5.14 Procurement Management Plan

6.1 Administrative Close

6.2 Contract Close

7.0 Glossary

7.1 Acronyms and Abbreviations

7.2 Definitions

Revision History

Revision Number / Date / Comment
1.0 / July 10, 2007 / Original Scope[1] and Initial Baseline
1.1 / July 18, 2007 / Revisions in various section areas

About This Document

This document is a template that provides the industry accepted guidelines to plan, execute, control, and close a project. This document will need to be tailored and customized to the needs of the project; however, special care should be considered if major sections are “tailored out”.

  1. “Tailoring” is the process that modifies the structural components of the template to the needs of a specific project. As an example, the Project Manager may have a standard appendix that does not apply to the project.
  2. Customization is the mechanical task of inserting customer or project logos, deliverable identifiers, names, and so on, into a copy of the template. The copy then becomes the live version of the Project Management Plan for the project and will need to be updated, as project conditions require.
  3. Any level of tailoring can be applied to the template, as long as the PMO is advised. This notification has several purposes:
  4. It allows Quality Assurance to adjust checklists and questionnaires,
  5. It allows the Program Management Office (PMO) to adjust its oversight and QA activities to the project’s plan,
  6. It allows the PMO to advise the project team of the potential effects and risks that may occur if materials are omitted, and
  7. It serves as a trigger for possible improvement of the template by the PMO.
  1. Any highlighted text indicates that there are some brief instructions for the completion of that section.

1.0 Project Overview[OCIO1]

Supercomputing is rapidly becoming an essential element of innovation and competitiveness. Computer-based methods now play a central role in all areas of economic development, education, and research. Economically, computational analysis, modeling, and simulation have become a distinguishing factor in business competitiveness. Educationally, developing computing skills in students is an essential part in preparing for a future in a wide range of careers.

Establishing the New MexicoComputingApplicationsCenter will greatly accelerate these trends to the benefit of New Mexico. The Center will provide a nation-wide fabric of scientists and institutions — including leading-edge industrial partners — that are working together (in New Mexico!) on issues important to the State and the Nation.

The Department of Information Technology will oversee the creation of t the NMCAC core building in the greater Albuquerque area which ultimately will host 56 permanent staff and support personnel, in addition to 120-140 visiting staff and students at any given time. The computational staff will consist of scientists who are skilled in computation and also have a background in Research and Development (R&D) areas of interest to the NMCAC (such as energy, water, health, nanotechnology, etc). In addition, faculty, staff, and students at the gateways and other collaborating institutions will contribute to the staffing of the NMCAC.

It is anticipated that the NMCAC will have major gateways located at the two national laboratories (Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory) and at the three New Mexico research universities (New Mexico State University, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, and the University of New Mexico). These gateways will have very high-speed fiber connectivity, small computing clusters, high-speed, high definition video conferencing, a large 3-D visualization screen, and desktop computing platforms with 3-D visualization. In addition, the State anticipates standing up minor gateways at the other public colleges and universities in New Mexico (numbering almost 40 sites in total) with varying degrees of high-speed connectivity, videoconferencing, desktop computing platforms, and 3-D visualization.

In order to support the NMCAC participants with access to world-class computing assets, the NMCAC first will acquire state-of-the-art cluster computing capacity with a nominal speed of 100-200 Teraflops.

The strength of the NMCAC lies in the State's outstanding intellectual resources in the areas of computing and R&D. The NMCAC itself will host a talented set of computer and computational scientists working closely with researchers at universities, laboratories, and high-tech businesses within the State. While the talented people (current and future hires) provide the foundation necessary for success, the State must be able to provide the researchers with the tools needed to apply that talent to economic and workforce development. The central workhorse of the NMCAC will be one of the fastest computers for unclassified research in the world performing at more than 100 Teraflops when it goes live.

The NMCAC will provide an ideal environment for researchers from industry, national laboratories, and universities to collaborate both on-site and in “virtual interaction labs” in efforts to accelerate innovation. A major focus will be to bring together computational and simulation tools with researchers and businesses in the State that to establish New Mexico as a global leader in targeted areas of scientific discovery and technological innovation. In fact, one of the requirements of any partnering institution is that their researchers and students must spend time in New Mexico working at the NMCAC. This will help develop the personal relationships that are key to encouraging businesses to permanently site some of their R&D efforts in New Mexico. Once the R&D centers develop new technologies that result in new products, the State will have a basis of attracting the manufacturing of those new products.

In sum, the goals are to:

1)Promote economic development in New Mexico by establishing and maintaining the State as a world leader in innovation

2)Incubate new, innovative businesses and give a competitive advantage to New Mexico business, thus creating high-paying sustainable jobs,

3)Support science and technology education in our State and build a pipeline of highly qualified computational scientists and engineers, with job opportunities in New Mexico

4)Become an example for the way in which disparate organizations with common interests can interact with significant impact.

Funding for the New Mexico Computer Applications Center is anticipated to be provided by the State of New Mexico, with additional funds from a variety of sources that will be pursued with the establishment of a 501(C)3 Organization. The NMCAC will explore private sector partnerships to form an element critical to driving economic development. The NMCAC desires to achieve self-sustaining funding after 5 years.

$42M is the anticipated level State of New Mexico funding with $14M having been appropriated for FY08.

2.0 Scope

2.1 Project Justification[OCIO2]

The justification for this project comes from the State of New Mexico’s Legislative decision to fund the acquisition of high performance computing equipment, services, infrastructure, and operating software to be housed in an appropriate facility in the Albuquerque area.

2.2 Project Objectives

The scope of work for this New Mexico Computing Application Center project is determined by:

  1. Capital Funding from the SENATE FINANCE COMMITTEE, Senate Bill 827 Section 61 -DEPARTMENT OF FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION PROJECTS-- GENERAL FUND.; 7. fourteen million dollars ($14,000,000) to plan, design, construct, renovate, improve, purchase and equip a state center for advanced computing;
  2. State of New Mexico Purchasing RFP 70-361-00-00003 issued for the NMCAC. This RFP covers the acquisition of high performance computing equipment, services, infrastructure, and operating software, as well as for the provision of a facility to house the computing equipment. The request for proposal is expected to result in the procurement and deployment of a high performance computer capable of at least 100 trillion operations per second (100Teraflops) to be housed at a facility in the greater Albuquerque, New Mexico area.
  3. State of New Mexico and Department of Information Technology requirements that IT projects of this financial magnitude and visibility undergo a certification process to obtain the release of the appropriation funds to support the awarded contract for RFP 70-361-00-00003.
  4. Terms of the RFP which will form the basis of the awarded contract including: fulfillment of requirements; verification, validation and benchmark tests; acceptance testing period; and final acceptance testing on or before June 30th, 2008.

2.2.1 Business Objectives[OCIO3]

Number / Description
Business Objective 1 / New computing clusters for the NMCAC. It is expected the procured computational system will consist of a cluster with a theoretical peak performance of 100 TFLOPS or greater. The clusteris planned to be in operation for four years following final acceptance, and should be built from Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) components, to the extent feasible, while still meeting the requirements of the SOW.
Business Objective 2 / The codes and jobs that are expected to be run on the NMCAC Cluster can use a small number of processors concurrently or a large number, depending on the problem being investigated. Hence the cluster will normally have many concurrent jobs running of varying sizes. Sometimes, however, a cluster will be used for a job that requires all processors for the same problem concurrently. The proposed cluster must therefore allow any size job up to and including those requiring all of the compute processors, or any number of smaller jobs concurrently.

2.2.2 Technical Objectives[OCIO4]

The Request for proposal provides a detailed list of very specific requirements. This project Management Plan Document will list only the highest level of technical objectives.

Number / Description
Technical Objective 1 / The cluster shall consist of commercially available rack-mounted servers as nodes; with a high-speed interconnect for high-bandwidth, low-latency communication between the nodes, as well as Ethernet for administrative communication.
Technical Objective 2 / A design for the cluster, leveraging multi-socket/multi-core node technologies to optimize system performance, switch port count and interconnect bandwidth utilization
Technical Objective 3 / The cluster must be a well-balanced highly available production system with respect to CPU performance, system scalability, available memory, I/O performance, and available storage.
Technical Objective 4 / The majority of the cluster nodes shall be used as compute nodes; however additional nodes are required for interactive, service, and I/O capability
Technical Objective 5 / A configuration with a sufficient quantity of nodes to provide a high degree of usability, administration, and performance
Technical Objective 6 / A scalable administration process must be provided to ensure the system can be rebooted in 30 minutes or less.
Technical Objective 7 / The NMCAC desires that the cluster performance, as measured in Tflops/s (10e12floating point operations per second), be as high as achievable. In particular, the NMCAC is interested in having the cluster rank highly in the Top 500 List

2.3 Deliverables

2.3.1 Project Management Deliverables[OCIO5]
2.3.1.1 [Project Charter
This document establishes the governance and scope of the project
2.3.1.2 Project Management Plan
This is the project plan document that builds on the project charter and lays out how the project will be managed for risks, issues, communications, and the like
2.3.1.2 Request for Project Certification and release of Funds
This document provides rationale for the project’s request for certification that will release the project’s appropriation funds for use for the vendors execution contract
2.2.1.3 Risk Assessment
This is the project plan document that builds on the project charter and lays out how the project will be managed for risks, issues, communications, and the like
2.2.1.4 Project Schedule
This is the project plan document that builds on the project charter and lays out how the project will be managed for risks, issues, communications, and the like
2.2.1.5 Project Closeout Report
This is the project plan document that builds on the project charter and lays out how the project will be managed for risks, issues, communications, and the like
2.3.2 Product Deliverables[OCIO6]

This is the initial list – it is anticipated that there will be elaboration of documents such as

  • Initial deployment and transition to operations plan
  • Initial Operations and Support Plan
  • Systems Specifications Requirements
  • Initial Training Requirements
  • System Architecture Document
  • System Use Cases where appropriate
  • Test Cases or system acceptance criteria
  • Systems Design Documents
2.3.2.1 Initial Requirements
These are the mandatory and desirable technical and operational requirements that were used as the requirements submitted as part of the RFP
2.3.2.2 Request for Proposal
This is the State Purchasing Document that was posted on the Web site and used as the guidelines and prevailing rules for vendor submission of their proposal for this project
2.3.2.2 Contract
This will be the State contract issued to the vendor for the execution of the project -
2.3.2.2 Requirements Change Request
This will be the document used by the project for any desired requirements that the vendor agreed to include in the project contract, or the inclusion of the exemplars or test environment

2.3.2.2 Revised requirements Document

This document will be the document to be used by the technical review team, and by the final acceptance committee for acceptance of the system and the close of the project. It will serve as the basis of requirements traceability.
2.3.3 Deliverable Approval Authority Designations[OCIO7]

The deliverable approval process needs to be among the topics between the NMCAC Advisory Committee and the DoIT Project Management Services group – Project Oversight and Compliance Division.

Deliverable Number / Deliverable / Approvers (Who can approve) / Date Approved
PRJ-DEL-001 / Project Management Plan (PMP)

2.3.4 Deliverable Acceptance Procedure[OCIO8]

2.4 Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)[OCIO9]

The diagram below represents the projects tasks at the planning phase of the project. A more detailed WBS will be presented with the awarding of the contract and the collaboration between the vendor and the project

3.0 Overall Strategy[OCIO10]

3.1 Project Management Life Cycle[OCIO11]

The project management life cycle for this project will be a mixture of the traditional Project Management Institute’s five processes shown below and the state of the New Mexico Project Certification process.

3.1.1 PMI Project Processes

Key aspects of each of these five processes are identified as including the following:

Initiating:

Project Charter

Project Scope