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Video: Lustre as a Root File System / Speeding up Metadata

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 07:40:07 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpnYkx69QSc

In this video, Robin Humble, NCINF, presents Lustre as a root file system. Recorded at the LUG’2011 conference in Orlando on April 13, 2011. Slides from the conference will be posted soon at the conference site.

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What to read at insideHPC this week

John West — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:58:10 +0000

Wondering what to read at insideHPC? Some of the most popular posts this week are:

Last nail pounded in as OpenSolaris board resigns
Microsoft parallel runtime expected to go commercial next year
NVIDIA names GATech CUDA Center of Excellence
FAA uses HPC to make sure planes stay in the air
HPC Advisory Council adds centers of excellence

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What to read at insideHPC this week

John West — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:32:51 +0000

Wondering what to read at insideHPC? Some of the most popular posts this week are:

OpenSolaris dead at age 5
September HPC User Forum Will Probe New/Emerging HPC Markets
DARPA funds Kendall Square startup to develop probability chip
Parry lands at SolarFlare
Justin Rattner with (some) details on Intel’s UHPC research

If you aren’t subscribed to our email updates already, your friends are probably pointing and laughing at you behind your back. Show them you aren’t hopelessly behind on every day’s HPC news by signing up for daily email digest.

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What to read at insideHPC this week

John West — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:00:04 +0000

Wondering what to read at insideHPC? Some of the most popular posts this week are:

Details on Intel’s manycore development platform
Gates calls for better disease modeling software
NVIDIA-led team scores a spot on DARPA UHPC
CUDA by Example: An Introduction to General-Purpose GPU Programming
NZ weather predictor rejects commercial clouds on bandwidth basis

The breaking news this week are the trickles coming out about the awardees in DARPA’s UHPC program. If you want to catch up, check out DARPA’s announcement, plus the news from the NVIDIA and Intel teams.

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Link and run for 08/05/2010

John West — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 02:48:06 +0000

Japanese Supercomputer Ranked 1st In The Little Green500 List
A Japanese university and research institute has announced that their supercomputer system was ranked first in a ranking of supercomputer’s performance per unit power consumption. The supercomputer system, Grape-DR, was ranked first in the Little Green500 list, getting a 5% higher score than IBM Corp’s system that is located in Germany, and ranked second in the list. In order to achieve this, they combined 64 pairs of Intel’s Core i7-920 processors and a board mounted with four of the Grape-DR accelerator chips.

Mathematics + Supercomputers = Big Bang Explained
Scientists now have a better chance of finding answers to that mystery because of the massive computational power of supercomputers – today’s fastest, most powerful computers, says Daniel R. Reynolds, assistant professor of mathematics in Dedman College.

CHPC Awards First GPGPU Cluster Contract to Orange Business Services
Orange Business Services has been awarded the supply and implementation order for the first GPGPU (general-purpose computation on graphics processing units) high performance computing cluster at the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in South Africa.

BioTeam Tweaks Amazon’s HPC Cloud
The BioTeam has devised a method for expanding the boot volume of Amazon’s HPC-oriented Cluster Compute instances. The guys at BioTeam wanted to run bonnie++ (a benchmark suite for disks and filesystems) on an Amazon boot volume but Bonnie++ ideally needs to work with a system that is roughly twice the size of the currently available 23GB of physical RAM on the Cluster Compute instances, which also only has 20GB of disk space. However after 20 or so minutes of tinkering (by really technically endowed people), they claim that they were able to expand the system disk to 80GB. The pleasant surprise here according to BioTeam is that all of this was possible without having to debug boot failures or grapple with ugly kernel panics or any of the other issues that one runs into when partitioning low level disk systems.

Linux supercomputer, worth £2m, sought by University of Warwick
The University of Warwick is tendering for a new Linux-based High Performance Computing facility for its research Centre for Scientific Computing (CSC). A “significant” share of the new facility will be used for research in the field of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD – the study of the dynamics of electrically conducting fluids such as plasma and metal liquids), to support the computational requirements of the UK MHD research community. The facility will also be used to support research from other disciplines at the university.

Budding Engineers Build a Supercomputer
From 6th to 9th July, twenty 16 and 17 year-old students descended on the University of Southampton to take part in a Supercomputing course put together by The Smallpeice Trust and delivered in partnership with the University of Southampton’s School of Engineering Sciences and Microsoft.

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What to read at insideHPC this week

John West — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:43:01 +0000

Wondering what to read at insideHPC? Some of the most popular posts this week are:

Open Grid Forum president says grids not dead yet
Industry experts form new Lustre startup
New Zealand switches on new IBM
SC10 encourages disruptions
Sponsored Post: Breaking Through Real World Storage Barriers in Next Generation Sequencing

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What to read at insideHPC this week

John West — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 17:09:43 +0000

Wondering what to read at insideHPC? Some of the most popular posts this week are:

Sponsored Post: breaking through real world storage barriers in next generation sequencing
Patterson: Multicore is a Hail Mary pass
Podcast: New Exascale Report Tracks the Future
Warwick building an HPC system for MHD
Dell to upgrade NASA’s climate super

If you aren’t subscribed to our email updates already, signing up for the daily email digest.

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What to read at insideHPC this week

John West — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:29:45 +0000

Wondering what to read at insideHPC? Some of the most popular posts this week are:

LONI Tech Forum
Amazon EC2 cluster workload management
Amazon adds support for traditional HPC workloads with Cluster Compute instance
MVAPICH 1.5 official release
SC10 aims to encourage growth of HPC workforce

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Link and Run for 07/09/2010

John West — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 19:28:41 +0000

EMC to Acquire Greenplum
EMC Corporation, the world’s leading provider of information infrastructure solutions, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire California-based Greenplum, Inc. Greenplum is a privately-held, fast-growing provider of disruptive data warehousing technology, a key enabler of “big data” clouds and self-service analytics. Upon completion of the acquisition, Greenplum will form the foundation of a new data computing product division within EMC’s Information Infrastructure business.

Heterogeneous Multi-Core Chips Might Be Needed for Exascale Computers
The next big thing for supercomputers are projected to be exascale machines. The leading chip designers are working on technologies that will enable the next leap in the high-performance computing space. According to an HPC expert from the University of Tennessee, in exascale systems will require new central processors, graphics processors or hybrids that combine both onto the same piece of silicon. But, Cell chips, which are heterogeneous multi-core processors, are dead end.

Introducing OpenCL
Over the past decade, graphics cards have gone from being simple accelerators to being fast general-purpose computing engines. David Chisnall looks at OpenCL, a new API for running non-graphics applications on modern GPUs.

Australians launch new Compute Cloud
With the launch of their new Compute Cloud last month, the Australian Research Collaboration Service aims to bring user friendly grid and cloud computing to a whole new level.

Supercomputer centre to boost telescope bid
The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works yesterday recommended the Federal Government spend $66 million to build the Pawsey High Performance Computing Centre in Perth.

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What to read at insideHPC this week

John West — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:23:06 +0000

Wondering what to read at insideHPC? Some of the most popular posts this week are:

IBM revs OpenCL for Linux on POWER
Euro grid initiative shuts down
Intro to Ranger from Cornell
A Top500 calculator with benefits
SDSC connects high schoolers with HPC

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What to read at insideHPC this week

John West — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:59:52 +0000

Wondering what to read at insideHPC? Some of the most popular posts this week are:

ActiveState adds popular scientific packages to distribution
Cray’s Baker pops out of the oven as company “re-learns” how to make great systems
Tokyo Tech Selects Voltaire for TSUBAME 2.0
Oracle Announces New HPC Cluster Servers
NASA Goddard Announces NASA Center for Climate Simulation

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Link and Run for 06/25/2010

John West — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 20:02:39 +0000

Do Processors Really Matter Anymore?
But now that processors have gotten so powerful and the ability to pool them has been simplified, is it time to start wondering whether the old ways of placing value on new equipment are no longer valid?

Science at Scale: SciDAC Astrophysics Code Scales to Over 200K Processors
MAESTRO, a low Mach number code for studying the pre-ignition phase of Type Ia supernovae, as well as other stellar convective phenomena, has just been demonstrated to scale to almost 100,000 processors on the Cray XT5 supercomputer “Jaguar” at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. And CASTRO, a general compressible astrophysics radiation/ hydrodynamics code which handles the explosion itself, now scales to over 200,000 processors on Jaguar—almost the entire machine. Both scaling studies simulated a pre-explosion white dwarf with a realistic stellar equation of state and self-gravity.

Parallel Studio Meets Visual Studio 2010
Intel’s James Reinders talks with Steve Teixeira, Product Unit Manager for Parallel Developer Tools at Microsoft, about the new Visual Studio’s support for parallel programming.

Supercomputer helps telescope see echos from the big bang
An international collaboration of scientists has announced the first results of the ACT project, probing the early years of the Universe, at Canada’s largest supercomputing conference in Toronto today. The presentation was made by Jonathan Sievers, of the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics.

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What to read this week

John West — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:58:16 +0000

Wondering what to read at insideHPC? Some of the most popular posts this week are:

Early results from DOE cloud experiment: MPI applications are slower
Book review: Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing
Clustercorp Updates CUDA and Absoft Rolls
Tilera and Quanta announce cloud server platform
Universities tout their Top500 number

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What does HPC stand for?

John West — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:09:46 +0000

Hopping Pickle Chopper?

In my never-ending quest to bring you HPC news from the darkest corners of the Internet, I regularly do Google searches for those three letters. Most of the time the results are at least related to HPC, if not of interest to you. But over the years I’ve had fun noticing what else HPC stands for.

This week, I’ve decided to share the fun with you by picking out some of the non-high performance computing uses of that abbreviation that I’ve spotted in just the past couple days (in order of occurrence in my inbox)

Hollywood Parish Church
High Performance Concrete
Hindustan Petroleum Corporation
Hindustan Paper Corporation
Highpoint Presbyterian Church
Healing Place Church
High Performance Center teams (some sort of field hockey thing)
High Performance Centre at the University of Pretoria (South Africa’s first elite performance sports facility, has something to do with cricket I think)
Historic Preservation Commission
High-pressure compressor
Heat Pump Centre
Health Professions Council
HousePriceCrash (UK website)
Hmar People’s Convention
Hixson Presbyterian Church
High Performance Cycling

No pickle chopppers…this week anyway.

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Link and Run for 06/22/10

John Leidel — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 01:36:34 +0000

PBS Works 10.4 Increases Accuracy and Predictability for HPC Capacity Planning and Forecasting

The new version of PBS Professional®, the foundation for PBS Works, offers customers a next-generation backfill scheduling system with the ability to accurately predict job start times. PBS Analytics™ 10.4 introduces a new standalone resource utilization data analysis and visualization module, License Analytics. License Analytics can be deployed within any IT environment and is an easy-to-use solution that supports data-driven planning and decision-making. Together, the enhancements allow customers to maximize information technology (IT) investments by enabling more accurate forecasting and capacity planning decisions.

Chelsio Announces Unified Manager 1.1

Unified Manager centrally manages all Chelsio network adapter cards on the network across Windows and Linux environments. It includes an intuitive GUI and command line interface, providing a simple to use, fast tool for IT managers to access every iSCSI initiator or target, iWARP peer, TCP/IP Offload (TOE) enabled and stateless NICs on a network. Unified Manager now works on a wide range of operating systems: Windows 2003 and 2008, RHEL 4, 5, SLES 10, 11, Solaris 10, Open Solaris, FreeBSD and Mac OS.

Voltaire Announces New Low-Latency Layer 2/3 Switch

The combination of the Voltaire Vantage 8500 Layer 2 core switches and new Vantage 6024 switches enables customers to build flat datacenter fabrics of more than 3,400 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports with non-blocking, lossless switch capacity of 69.12 Terabits per second. Voltaire Unified Fabric Manager (UFM) software orchestrates the fabric as a single logical entity, enforcing fabric-wide service policies, providing real-time fabric and application level monitoring, and simplifying fabric administration across many physical and virtual switching elements.

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Thanks for the Facebook love

John West — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:58:35 +0000

Just a quick “thanks” to the 23 of you who “liked” insideHPC on Facebook — we are up to 313 now, well over my feel good “300.” Thanks!

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Link and Run for 06/18/2010

John West — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 17:00:16 +0000

Microsoft begins expansion of its Data Center in Quincy, Washington
Earlier this month, Microsoft began a major expansion of its Columbia Data Center in Quincy, Washington and has started to excavate ground for the ‘Phase 2’ data center building (see attached photos of the excavation at the Quincy site).

This Week’s Multicore Reading List
A list of book releases compiled by Dr. Dobb’s to keep you up-to-date on parallel programming and multicore technology.

SGI Releases InfiniteStorage 5000 SAS External Storage System
New Storage Product Delivers 6 Gb/s SAS Technology Offering Mid-Range Performance, Scalability and Features at Entry-Level Price Points

Appro Deploys a World Class Linux Cluster Testbed Solution to LLNL in Support of the Hyperion Project
Appro, a leading provider of supercomputing solutions, today announces the deployment of a Data Intensive Testbed Cluster solution based on Appro servers configured with ioMemory technology from Fusion-io to extend the existing Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Hyperion system. Hyperion is the world’s largest Linux cluster dedicated test bed for development and testing of critical Linux cluster technologies.

SGI Helps Queensland Government Accelerate Climate Science In Australia
SGI, a global leader in HPC and data center solutions, today announced that the Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management (DERM) has installed a high performance computing (HPC) and large-scale storage solution based on SGI Altix ICE 8200 and InfiniteStorage in its Brisbane facility for the processing of computationally intensive environmental modeling applications.

LSU Physics Professor Jorge Pullin Chairs Selection Committee for Einstein Prize
Jorge Pullin, a professor in the LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy and Interim co-Director of the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, is chairing the American Physical Society’s selection committee for the prestigious Einstein Prize.

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10 more likes and we’ll have 300 Facebook page fans

John West — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:38:47 +0000

I know it’s a silly thing, but we are at 290 fans of the insideHPC page on Facebook, and it would brighten my day to get to 300.

If you are a Facebook user, if you enjoy insideHPC, and if you haven’t yet “liked” our page, I hope you’ll take a minute today and click the button on our page at Facebook. We only need 10…but we’ll take 100.

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What to read at insideHPC this week

John West — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:15:09 +0000

Wondering what to read at insideHPC? Some of the most popular posts this week are:

LLNL creates 100+TB flash array with Fusion-io
PSC to begin accepting proposals for Anton
SeaMicro lifts veil on 512 core Atom server
Andrew’s Corner: CPU or GPU? Let’s ask the software
Louisiana students report to LSU’s Beowulf Boot Camp

There was also a lot of international news this week, with Japan looking to become the world’s “number 2,” South Korea looking to step up its HPC game, and the US gearing up for another HPC arms race.

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What to read at insideHPC this week

John West — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:00:59 +0000

Wondering what to read at insideHPC? Some of the most popular posts this week are:

Top500 movers and shakers
Link and Run for 05/29/2010
Overheard at ISC, Day 2
QLogic to optimize for NVIDIA GPUDirect
Intel lifts curtain on HPC plans

Our ISC’10 coverage was a big hit this week. Thanks for making us your ISC’10 information source.

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