Author Archives: shainer

SPM.Python Version 3.110505 Release

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We are proud to announce the release of SPM.Python version 3.110505, and wish to acknowledge the generous support of the HPC Advisory Council in providing access to GPU servers to validate and stress test of our solution.

SPM.Python is a scalable parallel version of the popular Python language. Showcased as a disruptive technology at Supercomputing 2010 and highlighted on StartUp Row at PyCON 2011, it enables users to exploit parallelism across servers, cores and GPUs in a fault tolerant manner.

Using resources at the HPC Advisory Council High Performance Center, we were able to conduct around 20,000 different sets of experiments; most were designed to fail in order to
validate the failure recovery and self-cleaning capabilities of SPM.Python.

With this release, users may launch any standalone application in parallel and in a manner that inherits fault tolerance from SPM.Python, thus freeing the developers to focus on their core application while maximizing utilization of resources and minimizing runtime costs.
Cheers!

Minesh

HPC Advisory Council 2nd Swiss Workshop Held this week

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This week we have held the 2nd HPC Advisory Council Swiss workshop in Lugano Switzerland. Nearly 140 attendees participated in the 3-days workshop, 18 sponsors sponsored the workshop, and it was covered by 3 media sponsors. Many videos from the workshop can be found for example on InsideHPC web site (www.insideHPC.com). All of the presentation can be found on the workshop web page – http://www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com/events/2011/switzerland_workshop/.

The workshop was very successful. We had presentations on various topics – MPI, networking, GPUs and many other topics, hands-on sessions on networking and Lustre, and overview on activities at various HPC centers around the world.

I would like to thank all the speakers, the attendees and the sponsors. Now we are getting ready to the next workshop in Germany as part of ISC’11 – http://www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com/events/2011/european_workshop/. I encourage you to join us at the workshop. Folks interested in sponsoring or presenting – please drop me a note at info@hpcadvisorycouncil.com.

All the best,

Gilad, HPC Advisory Council Chairman

 

Swiss

SC11 Student Cluster Competition Now Open for Student Teams to Break World Record

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Student teams are encouraged to submit proposals to build high performance computing clusters on the convention center floor in real time and push their applications to the limit to win bragging rights as the world’s best. Submissions are now open for the fifth annual Student Cluster Competition (SCC) for at the SC11 conference held in Seattle, WA on Nov. 12 – 18, 2011. Please note that the deadline for teams to enter contest is April 15

The competition pits six teams of undergraduates against one another to see who can build and configure a cluster in 46 hours that accomplishes the most work using “real world” computational codes in the least amount of time. In addition to time constraints, students must work within the parameters of the designated system and power configurations, and use open-source software to solve the applications provided to them.

In addition to showcasing the power of current-generation clusters, one of SCC’s primary goals is to demonstrate to companies and supercomputing labs that the best high performance computing (HPC) candidates might be as close as the university next door. Through the final selection process, the SCC committee focuses on recruiting the best high performance computing talent to compete each year.

Student teams may now submit their applications at the SC11 Submissions Site - https://submissions.supercomputing.org/ ; the SCC deadline is April 15, 2011. Teams will find more information and may refer to a sample Student Cluster Competition submission form.
For additional information, please contact student-cluster-competition@info.supercomputing.org

Teams looking for hardware resources for the competition are encourage to contact the council at info@hpcadvisorycouncil.com

Regards,

Gilad, HPC Advisory Council Chairman

Going to Switzerland for the 2nd HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Workshop!

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Next week we will be doing the HPCAC 2nd Switzerland workshop. Last year around 100 attendees enjoyed the three days of the workshop, the interesting presentations and the technical training.  Next week we expect to see higher number of attendees to participate and contribute to the workshop. There will be many very interesting presentations and of course hands-on training at the end of each day.

The complete agenda can be found on the workshop page – http://www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com/events/2011/switzerland_workshop/index.php. If you would like to attend and have not registered yet, please do it as soon as possible. It will be an excellent opportunity to meet some of the people who lead various development efforts in the multiple fields of high performance computing.

Best regards,

Gilad, HPC Advisory Council Chairman

Update from the HPC|GPU Working Group

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In the last few weeks the HPC|GPU group has made public several interesting testing results. The latest publications can be found on the HPC|GPU Working Group page – http://www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com/subgroups_hpc_gpu.php.

The most recent publication covered the GPU/Node optimum ratio topic, and in particular for the NAMD application (a parallel molecular dynamics code that received the 2002 Gordon Bell Award and designed for high-performance simulation of large biomolecular systems). The group was looking to indentify the desired ratio between how many GPU should be placed in a single node (from 1 to 4) in order to achieve the highest performance. The results indicate that a single GPU per node, and using more nodes is a better configuration performance wise versus packing more GPUs in a single node.

The testing effort covered other topics such as the performance gain versus the application dataset and more.  You are encouraged to review the complete results on the group page. The group welcomes new testing ideas and comments – please send them to the group mailing list.

Regards,

Gilad, HPC Advisory Council Chairman

ISC Events in 2011

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ISC possesses more than 25 years of leadership in organizing supercomputing, computing and scientific conferences and exhibitions. Our family of ISC events include the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) and the ISC Cloud Computing Conference (ISC Cloud’11).  

ISC is a key global conference and exhibition for HPC, networking and storage. This international conference (June 19 – 23, 2011 in Hamburg. Germany) reunites over 2,000 mind-alike HPC researchers, technology leaders, scientists and IT-decision makers and also offers a world-class exhibition by leading solutions providers of supercomputing, software, storage, networking, infrastructure technologies, and more (www.isc11.org). 

The ISC Cloud Conference will take place in Mannheim, Germany, September 26-27, 2011, bringing over 250 decision-makers from industry and research to discuss and find practical solutions on moving to the “Cloud”. More at http://www.isc-cloud.com/2011/.

We hope to see you all there at our ISC events during 2011!

Regards,

Martin Meuer, Prometeus GmbH

HPC|GPU special interest subgroup releasing first results for NVIDIA GPUDirect Technology

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The new HPC|GPU subgroup has been working recently to create first best practices around the new technology from NVIDIA – GPUDirect. Here is some background on GPUDirect: the system architecture of a GPU-CPU server requires the CPU to initiate and manage memory transfers between the GPU and the network. The new GPUDirect technology enables Tesla and Fermi GPUs to transfer data to pinned system memory that a RDMA capable network is able to read and send without the involvement of the CPU in the data path. The result is an increase in overall system performance and efficiency by reducing the GPU to GPU communication latency (by 30% as was published by some vendors). The HPC|GPU subgroup is first to release benchmarks results of application using GPUDirect. The application that was chosen for the testing was Amber, a molecular dynamics software package. Testing with 8 nodes cluster demonstrated up to 33% performance increase using GPUDirect. If you want to read more – check out the HPC|GPU page – http://www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com/subgroups_hpc_gpu.php.

 

Regards,

Gilad

HPC Applications Best Practices

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Wanted to let you know that we have extended the high-performance applications best practices to:

 

1. Extend the applications performance, optimization and profiling guidelines to cover nearly 30 different applications, both commercial and open source – http://www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com/best_practices.php

 

2. We have added the first case using RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) to the performance, optimization and profiling guidelines page. It is under the same link as in item 1

 

3. New – installations guides – for those who asked to get a detailed description on where to get the application from, what is needed to be installed, how to install on a cluster, and how to actually run the application – it is now posted under the HPC|Works subgroup – http://www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com/subgroups_hpc_works.php. We will be focusing on open source applications, which sometime it challenging to really find this info. At the moment we have installations guides for BQCD, Espresso and NAMD, and more will come in the near future.

 

If you would like to propose new applications to be covered under the performance, optimization and profiling guidelines, or to be added to the installations guides, please let us know via info@hpcadvisorycouncil.com.

Best regards,

Gilad

HPC Advisory Council Announces 2nd Annual China High-Performance Computing Workshop Program

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For those who missed the announcement, our 2nd Annual China High-Performance Computing Workshop will be on October 27th, 2010 in Beijing, China in conjunction with the HPC China National Annual Conference on High-Performance Computing. The Call for presentations as well as workshop sponsorships are now open – http://www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com/events/2010/china_workshop/. The workshop will focus on efficient high-performance computing through best practices, future system capabilities through new hardware, software and computing environments and high-performance computing user experience.

The workshop will be opened with keynote presentations by Prof. Dhabaleswar K. (DK) Panda who leads the Network-Based Computing Research Group at The Ohio State University (USA) and Dr. HUO Zhigang from the National Center for Intelligent Computing (China). The keynotes will be followed by distinguished speakers from the academia and the industry. The workshop will bring together system managers, researchers, developers, computational scientists and industry affiliates to discuss recent developments and future advancements in High-Performance Computing.

And again – Call for Presentations and Sponsorships are now Open, so if you are interested, let us know. For the preliminary agenda and schedule, please refer to the workshop website. The workshop is free to HPC China attendees and to the HPC Advisory Council members. Registration is required and can be made at the HPC Advisory Council China Workshop website.

Regards,

Gilad Shainer