HPC Advisory Council

We are just 11 days away from the 3-day HPC Advisory Council workshop in Lugano, Switzerland.  We have an extremely packed agenda with a slew of exciting topics and presenters( see below). Hope you can make it…psst…it’s free! Register now.

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Eager to know about the Council and what activities are being planned for the future? Gilad and I recently had a nice discussion with Dan Olds from Gabriel Consulting regarding the HPC Advisory Council and our continued efforts to broaden the knowledge of HPC to the masses. The result of our discussion was posted as a webcast on The Register.  Check it out!

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The Council continues to be very active with our ongoing worldwide workshop programs. Many thanks to our members for adding their support and sponsoring the events, such as AMD, HP, IBM, Mellanox, Microsoft, Voltaire and more.

First up: The HPC Advisory Council and the Swiss Supercomputing Centre will host the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Workshop 2010  in the Lugano Convention Centre, Lugano, Switzerland, from March 15-17, 2010. This is an excellent training and educational opportunity for European-based, HPC and data center IT professionals (See AGENDA). Attendance is FREE and registration is now OPEN.

Second: The HPC Advisory Council will hold the 2010 European Workshop on May 30th, 2010, in conjunction with the ISC’10 conference in Hamburg Germany. The workshop will be a full day workshop, and will include coffee breaks, lunch and dinner, courtesy of the HPC Advisory Council. Attendance to the workshop is a nominal fee of  30€ . Register today for the conference by clicking on the Council Workshop box when registering for ISC.

More workshop are being planned for the second half of 2010. Stay tuned for more info.

Hope to see you all there,

Brian Sparks

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As U.S. government agencies and departments evaluate the potential cost savings, service level improvements and greater resource utilization offered by various cloud computing models, there is a recognized need for a technology-agnostic platform that can support and integrate legacy, heterogeneous HPC environments while also managing a wide-range of hardware, operating systems and virtual machines. In order to maximize prior technology investments, government agencies must invest in technologies that prevent vendor lock-in and that work with multiple types of operating systems.

With that, I wanted to draw your attention to a partnership between Platform and Instrumental to advance High Performance Cloud Computing for the Government Sector.  The partnership enhances Platform’s global service capabilities and gives users an end-to-end, full service solution that maximizes the value of Platform’s private cloud management and HPC cloud-enabling software solutions, Platform ISF and Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster.  The full press release can be seen here. 

Dave Ellis
Principal Technologist
Instrumental, Inc.

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InfiniBand and Ethernet are the leading interconnect solutions for connecting servers and storage systems in high-performance computing and in enterprise (virtualized or not) data centers. Recently, the HPC Advisory Council has put together the most comprehensive database for high-performance computing applications to help users understand the performance, productivity, efficiency and scalability differences between InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

In summary, there are a large number of HPC applications that need the lowest possible latency for best performance or the highest bandwidth (for example Oil&Gas applications as well as weather related applications). There are some HPC applications that are not latency sensitive. For example, gene sequencing and some bioinformatics applications are not sensitive to latency and scale well with TCP-based networks including GigE and 10GigE. For HPC converged networks, putting HPC message passing traffic and storage traffic on a single TCP network may not provide enough data throughput for either. Finally, there is a number of examples that show 10GigE has limited scalability for HPC applications and InfiniBand proves to be a better performance, price/performance, and power solution than 10GigE.

The complete report can be found under the HPC Advisory Council case studies or by clicking here.

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The HPC Advisory Council participated in the “Workshop on High Performance Interconnects for Distributed Computing (HPI-DC’09)” part of the IEEE Cluster 2009 conference. Several members (Joshua More from AMD, Jeff Layton from Dell, and me) presented research results on “Scheduling Strategies for HPC as a Service (HPCaaS)”. You can find the presentation under the Content page/conference at the HPC Advisory Council main page.

The workshop was well organized by Ada Gavrilovska (Georgia Tech) and Pavan Balaji (Argonne National Lab) with the help from Steve Poole (Oak Ridge National Lab). Other interesting sessions were given by Nagi Rao (ORNL) on wide area InfiniBand, James Hofmann (Naval Research Lab) on Large Data project, Hari Subramoni (The Ohio State University) on InfiniBand RDMA over Ethernet (LLE) and others.

The next council event is the HPC China workshop. More data on the workshop is posted at – http://www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com/events/china_workshop/

Gilad Shainer HPC Advisory Council Chairman
gilad@hpcadvisorycouncil.com

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The HPC Advisory Council is now on Twitter

twitter.com/hpccouncil

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I recently had the pleasure to go to Salzburg, Austria, and present in the 7^th European LS-DYNA conference. LS-DYNA is a software solution from Livermore Software Technology Corporation (LSTC) that is a general purpose structural and fluid analysis simulation software package capable of simulating complex real world problems. It is widely used in the automotive industry for crashworthiness analysis, occupant safety analysis, metal forming and much more, and in most cases, LS-DYNA is being used in cluster environments as they provide the needed flexibility, scalability and efficiency for such simulations.

I have presented a paper on “LS-DYNA Productivity and Power-aware Simulations in Cluster Environments”. The paper was written by Mellanox, Dell and AMD with the help of Sharan Kalwani from GM and LSTC. The paper covers clustering interconnect analysis, CPUs performance, application and networking profiling and providing recommendations for increasing productivity (or jobs per day) while reducing power and cooling expenses. The paper can be downloaded from the “content/conferences” section on the HPC Advisory Council web site.

There were some very interesting sessions at the conference (beside mine …J). The automotive makers have expressed their need to be more economical and ecological (without compromising the brand names), the challenges of light weight design, increase demands from regulations, new materials, alternative drive engines, cost efficiency, increase safety, design of energy management equipment and much more. All of those items continue to increase the need for more simulation and higher complexity in order to create a design that fulfills those requirements and enables faster solution time to market. The paper that I presented provides information and guidelines on how to build next generation systems from one side, and how to optimize current systems for higher productivity on the other.

I also did manage to find some time in the late evening, and walk throughout the old city of Salzburg and see the house that Mozart was born in. It is a lovely city, with many sight seeing and nice places to sit down and drink beer (or coke, if you know me….).

Regards,

Gilad Shainer
HPC Advisory Council Chairman

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The 2009 Oil and Gas High-Performance Computing Workshop was held on March 5th, 2009, and was hosted by the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology and the Energy and Environmental Systems Institute at Rice University. The goal of the workshop was to discuss industry specific needs and challenges and to engage in a dialog with HPC hardware and software vendors, as well as academic research communities. The focus of this particular workshop was on accelerators and hybrid computing, the future of parallel programming and tools, and storage and I/O solutions and the needs associated with systems deployed in oil and gas HPC environments.

The workshop was organized very well, and it was a great opportunity to meet and talk with many oil and gas users, as well as software and hardware vendors. In spite of the current recession, users still need to stay competitive and to increase their productivity. So new investments are definitely being made, but those investments are being carefully designed to ensure maximum ROI, and must certainly be future proofed.

The HPC Advisory Council presented recent work performed by its members – Gilad Shainer & Tong Liu (Mellanox Technologies), Joshua Mora (AMD), Jacob Liberman (Dell) and Owen Brazell (Schlumberger) on “ECLIPSE: Performance Benchmarking and Profiling”. Schlumberger’s ECLIPSE Reservoir Engineering software is a widely used oil and gas reservoir numerical simulation suite. Maximizing end-user productivity with ECLIPSE requires a deep understanding of how each component impacts the overall solution. Moreover, as new hardware and software comes to market, design decisions are often based on assumptions or projections rather than empirical testing. The presentation was targeted to removes the guesswork from cluster design for ECLIPSE by providing best practices for increased performance and productivity. The presentation included scalability testing, interconnect performance comparisons, job placement strategies, and power efficiency considerations.

The presentation can be downloaded from the HPC Advisory Council web (technical content/conferences section).

Commodity clusters, CPUs and interconnects can together provide the most efficient and productive systems for high-performance applications. The secret is in gathering the right components to create a balanced system, and with the right components and integration, one can maximize the system’s capability and to ensure system and application scaling. For more information in particular to ECLIPSE, please review the presentation.

For more questions and comments, we can be reached (as always) at HPC@mellanox.com.

Best regards,

Gilad, Chairman of the HPC Advisory Council

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This is the main issue HPC end-users are dealing with on a daily basis. No matter if it is a weather research application, automotive crash simulation, oil and gas reservoir modeling or quantum chemistry, achieving better productivity and reducing power consumption per simulation are important issues that influence research capabilities and commercial vendor competitiveness.

One of the main focuses of the HPC Advisory Council is to provide answers and guidelines for those questions. The HPC Advisory Council has been working the past few months (and will continue to do so) on providing best practices for application optimization across the HPC market. The HPC Advisory Council recently published information on weather research (WRF application) in English and Chinese, and on quantum chemistry (CPMD). Shortly, we will post information on automotive crash simulations (LS-DYNA), Oil and Gas (Eclipse) and bioscience (NAMD). I would like to thank the vendors and organizations (alphabetic order: AMD, CPMD, Dell, LSTC, Mellanox Technologies and Schlumberger) and the individuals (John Michalakes and Sharan Kalwani) that have contributed their time to support this large effort.

The data can be found at http://hpcadvisorycouncil.mellanox.com/best_practices.php

The HPC Advisory Council is welcoming end-users requests on other applications and cases that are of an interest. To submit a request, please send an email to HPC@mellanox.com.

Best Regards,

Gilad Shainer, HPC Advisory Council Chairman

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