In an interesting move for SDSC, Interactive Supercomputing announced yesterday that SDSC is making Star-P available on its interactive cluster, OnDemand. The announcement corresponds to the transition of OnDemand into production on October 1.
The OnDemand cluster is a Rocks cluster with 64 Intel dual-socket, dual-core compute nodes. The 2.33 GHz, 4-way nodes have 8 GB of memory. OnDemand has a nominal theoretical peak performance of 2.4 TFlops. The cluster has 30 TB in its IBRIX parallel file system. Jobs are scheduled by the Sun Grid Engine.
From an SDSC newsletter:
Star-P software is a client-server parallel-computing platform that’s been designed to work with multiple Very High Level Language (VHLL) client applications such as MATLAB, Python, R and others, and has built-in tools to expand VHLL computing capability through addition of libraries and hardware-based accelerators.
The obvious advantage here is that it allows non-HPC folks to stay in their familiar environments but to still get the advantages of big compute.
There’s even a video describing the deployment…yay, YouTube!
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