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| News digest 23 June 2005 |
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| PrimeurLive! from ISC2005 in Heidelberg |
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This year we again report Live! from Europe's main supercomputing event. See the issues for each day:
As last year we start each issue with an "blog" giving you some personal impressions. The next sections provide traditional reporting. The last section "Company news" provides mainly press release type of information from the companies. Hence, a few items are brought to you from three different view points.
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| Blog |
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| Vampir resurfaced |
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Parallel computers with thousands of processors can turn into a nightmare if your programme does not behave as expected, or even worse, produces errors in an unpredictable way. Bernd Mohrz gave an overview of the tools that are out there to help developers and users of parallel machines. There are a lot of them available. Unfortunately they are very fragmented: solving part of the problem on some systems only. Sometimes good tools dissapear. An example of the latter is Vampir. This graphical analyser was marketed by Pallas. When Pallas was acquired by Intel, Vampir, renamed, was only available for Intel platforms, leaving the others without support. Recently the old Vampire has resurfaced in an open source version that will be available for more systems. The web site is open already: http://vampir-ng.org Downloads will be available shortly. As part of a European project, called Apart, a summary of the tools that are available is published on the web site of the project: http://www.fz-juelich.de/apart/ This is a nice place to start when you need a performance optimization tool.
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| TOP500 |
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| BlueGene on its way to Jülich Germany |
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Did you have a look at position 60 of the TOP500? There is a BlueGene machine at Jülich research centre. Never heard of that system? That is correct. The German Research Center Jüich and IBM have signed the agreement. There will be a joint research project to investigate IBM eServer Blue Gene Systems for research in materials and natural sciences disciplines. The IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, USA, has shipped a one rack 2,048 processor Blue Gene/L system to Jülich. The installation is planned after in July 2005, after ISC2005. Nevertheless the system did debut on the TOP500 list of June 22, 2005. The actual Linpack benchmark performance of 4.7 Tflop/s was measured in Yorktown Heights.
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| Hardware |
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| Bank Sal. Oppenheim explores potential of Linux cluster for financial operations |
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In the ISC2005 Thursday morning session, Arno Radermacher, Senior Vice President for Production and Support at the Bank Sal. Oppenheim, a private bank located in Frankfurt am Main, presented the benefits of working with a HPC cluster in the financial market. He provided the audience with details on the objectives the bank aimed at with the HPC cluster and on the architecture blue print. In addition, he described the current solution and its capabilities and asked himself whether cluster technology is a commodity. He concluded by offering a glimpse into the short-term and long-term future bank expectations with regard to the cluster.
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| The bumpy path to PetaFlop/s scale computing |
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Steve Louis from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, and Alain Gara from the IBM Research Center in Yorktown Heights, described the possibilities of a cost-effective path towards PetaFlop/s scale computing by analysing the architecture details of the TOP500 number one BlueGene/L. The BlueGene/L scales to 360 Tflop/s with modified COTS and custom parts and is addressing five critical issues on the road to PetaFlop/s computing. These factors are power, floor space, cost, single processor performance, and network scalability. Five issues which have to provide an affordable path to PetaFlop/s scale computing, according to Steve Louis.
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| Hot Seat Session: transtec to provide hardware, management software and experience |
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Roland Fehrenbacher presented the German company transtec AG from Tübingen as a provider of hardware, powerful management software, and experience. The hardware transtec is providing is a standard 1 U or blade chassis. In addition, the company can deliver a complete spectrum of Intel/AMD CPU architectures and fast interconnects including Infiniband, Myrinet and Quadrics. As the distributed storage architecture transtec offers the Cluster File System Lustre with storage nodes up to 6 TB per node. transtec has experience with Linux clusters since 2001. They have installed more than 120 clusters across Europe. The transtec Beobox is their proprietary cluster OS.
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| Hot Seat Session: Cray going strong with X1E, XT3 and XD1 |
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Steve Scott gave an short overview of the three different Cray lines of supercomputers: X1E, XT3 and XD1. He stated that all of them had a measured memory balance with airport cards that deliver high bandwidth. The Cray family of supercomputers consists of very well balanced systems, he said. The company is selling their systems to customers that value these things. Among them are many European customers.
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| Trouble in paradise: technology disruptions threaten power and system optimization |
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In the second day keynote presentation at ISC2005, Alain Gara from the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, USA addressed some of the major problems the supercomputer community is facing in the light of building efficient high performance architectures in the future. Alain Gara predicted that the end of the power density generation scaling is driving the technology disruption. This factor is bound to have a far reaching impact. For the dream of building a PetaFlop computer before the end of this decade to come true, partnership will be critical to explore new architectural alternatives.
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| Hot Seat Session: IBM is taking care of the customer, says Mootaz Elnozahy |
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IBM representative Mootaz Elnozahy introduced the IBM involvement in the DARPA project on high performance to the ISC2005 audience under the title "Going to Peta-Scale". This IBM contribution is known as PERCS. The BlueGene is built on purpose for the HPC market. PERCS is a general design, aimed to be ready in 2010. When we take a look at the PERCS technologies, there is something to say about the productivity, the sytem and the technology.
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| Company news |
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| Quadrics on the Rocks |
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Quadrics announced in Heidelberg a new software release, "Hawk". It includes support for Rocks v3.3.0. A new version of RMS, RMS 3.x, the Quadrics cluster management toolkit that provides job launch and resource management, is also being released.
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| UK Atomic Weapons Establishment chooses Linux Networx |
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Linux Networx announced earlier this week in Heidelberg at ISC2005 that the Atomic Weapons Establishment plc (AWE), responsible for a key part of the United Kingdom's nuclear defense capability, has acquired an Evolocity visualization cluster system from Linux Networx. AWE is using the cluster as part of their ongoing research into new techniques for visualizing data produced by their extensive computer simulation facilities
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