Short Items of Interest for the HPC Community
And Look Elsewhere than in HPC for the Answer
Yet another entry in the Linux vs. Solaris scalability debate. This time it comes in Garrett D’Amore’s blog “Scalability FUD”, where he argues that, at least in the HPC arena, most operations involve “user” rather than “sys” time and, therefore, the calls to inter-thread synchronization are relatively few.
Sun Technology Underlies Esteem System’s Implementation
With its 1,088 computing cores, 100TB of data storage tied to a quad data rate Infiniband network and a quoted performance of 13 Teraflops at peak — equivalent to up to thirteen trillion operations per second — the new High Performance Computer at Scotland’s University of Strathclyde, implemented by supplier Esteem Systems using Sun technology, enables the university’s Faculty of Engineering to address complex problems in materials, fluid dynamics and design.
Flash Technology Can Speed Things Up
The Sun Storage Solutions white paper “Turbo-charging HPC Application Performance with Flash Storage: Changing the Focus from Processing to Moving Data Faster” contends that, with ever more CPU cores and more GFLOPS per core, HPC application performance will be determined by the ability to move data in and out of fast processors. This paper examines how Flash technology can be deployed and the effect it will have on HPC workloads. It examines various Flash technologies and compares their performance on leading HPC application benchmarks. Finally, the performance characteristics of the Flash-based Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System is described.
Benefits for HPC Implementations
Following on his talk “HPC Trends and Virtualization,” a presentation given at Sun’s HPC Consortium in Hamburg recently, Josh Simons goes further with his blog post “Virtualization for HPC: The Heterogeneity Issue,” a subject to which he takes an even-handed approach, conceding at the outset that ” … while heterogeneity is either desirable or to be avoided, depending on your viewpoint, virtualization can help in either case.”
Sun Blade Servers, Lustre Provide Affordable, Scalable Solution to Handle Complex Simulations
High-performance computing (HPC) initiative Petroleo Brasileiro (BR) Network was created to handle computer simulations to aid oil production in Brazil’s pre-salt basin. An HPC grid was required to handle the complex project with the goal being a high-performance, affordable solution that could expand easily over the next few years. Sun, IBM, Dell, Bull, SGI, and HP were consulted. After an extensive review process, the group decided that Sun would best meet its goals for performance, scalability, energy efficiency, and cost, the latter of which was 30% less than an offering from the closest competing vendor.
Presenations and Panel Discussions from 2-Day Event Now Available
Videos and PDFs are now available from the Sun HPC Consortium meeting held Nov. 14-15, in Portland, Ore. The 20-plus presentations include the opening talk from Sun VP of HPC and Cloud Computing Marc Hamilton, panel discussions on meteorology and climate as well as high performance data management, HPC software sessions, and much more.
Facility Brings New Level of Compute Power to Canadian Scientists
CLUMEQ is a supercomputing consortium of universities in the province of Quebec, Canada. It includes McGill University, Universite Laval, and all nine components of the Universite du Quebec network. CLUMEQ supports scientific research in disciplines such as climate and ecosystems modeling, high energy particle physics, cosmology, nanomaterials, supramolecular modeling, bioinformatics, biophotonics, fluid dynamics, data mining and intelligent systems. Sun is providing the technology for this HPC implementation.
An Assessment of the Cluster Approach to HPC
In his Sun BluePrints paper, “Sun Business Ready HPC for Altair RADIOSS: Best Practices for Altair RADIOSS Deployments,” Dr. Gunter Roeth, of Sun ISV Engineering provides insight into constructing an optimal configuration for Altair RADIOSS car crash simulations using a high-performance cluster of Sun systems equipped with x86/x64 processors. The paper points out how HPC solutions often consist of servers equipped with Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron processors that are clustered together using high-speed, low-latency interconnects. In many cases, Roeth writes, these high-performance clusters can match and even surpass the throughput capabilities of vertically-scalable proprietary solutions.
Simplify the Process of Deploying and Managing Large-scale Linux HPC Clusters
Anyone interested in an integrated open-source software solution for Linux-based high-performance computing (HPC) clusters running on Sun hardware may want to read the Sun BluePrints article “Using Sun Ops Center with Sun HPC Software, Linux 2.0.” Authors Mike Berg and Zhiqi Tao describe how to set up a Sun Ops Center server, provision the HPC cluster nodes (head node, Luster file system servers, and compute nodes), and configure system services.
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