Archive for February, 2010

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Last Days to Register to HPC Council Switzerland Workshop

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

With more than 100 registered attendees, the HPC Council Switzerland Workshop (Lugano, March 15-17) is having a great success.

If you want to know more about InfiniBand technologies, this is the right time to register online.

Download the latest agenda with the list gold ans silver sponsors: Flyer HPC Council Switzerland Workshop

Agenda – Day 1
9:00-9:30 Welcome Session (Gilad Shainer, HPC Advisory Council Chairman)
9:30-9:45 HPC in the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (Dominik Ulmer, CSCS)
9:45-10:00 HPC Systems in the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (Neil Stringfellow)
10:00-10:30 HPC Storage Systems at CSCS (Hussein N. Harake, CSCS)
10:30-10:45 The HPC Advisory Council Recent Activities (Gilad Shainer, HPC Advisory Council)
11:00-12:00 Sponsor Presentations (IBM, Microsoft, HP)
12:00-13:00 Lunch
13:00-14:30 InfiniBand Architecture Overview (Erez Cohen)
14:30-15:15 Large Scale Applications Scalability – Past Experience
15:30-16:15 InfiniBand Storage Tutorial (Mike Anderson, StreamScale)
16:15-17:00 Using InfiniBand for High-Performance Visualization – HPV (Stefan Eilemann, Eyescale Software GmbH
17:00-18:30 InfiniBand Clustering Basics Hands-on Training (Erez Cohen)
18:30-20:00 Evening Event

Agenda – Day 2
9:00-10:00 Advanced Topics in HPC Networking – Adaptive/Static Routing, Congestion Avoidance (Sven-Arne
Reinemo, Simula Research Laboratory)
10:00-10:45 Advanced HPC Technologies – Collectives Operations and Offloading (Gilad Shainer, HPC Advisory Council)
11:00-12:00 Sponsor Presentations (Sun, AMD, Voltaire)
12:00-13:00 Lunch
13:00-13:45 Networking Topologies – CLOS (Fat-Tree), 3D Torus, Network Management
13:45-14:00 Sponsor Presentation (Dell)
14:00-16:00 Clustering Fabric Management and Monitoring Hands-on (Erez Cohen)
16:30-17:30 Swiss Supercomputer Center – What We Need from InfiniBand? (Sadaf Alam, CSCS)
17:30-18:00 The JuRoPA Supercomputer – Experience from Building a Supercomputer (Hugo Falter, ParTec)
18:00-18:30 Q&A
18:30-20:00 Evening Event

Agenda – Day 3 (Industrial Day)
8:45-9:00 Industrial Day introduction (Gilad Shainer, HPC Advisory Council)
9:00-9:45 Keynote session: HPC – Challenges of the 21st century (Goldi Misra, Centre For Development of
Advanced Computing)
9:45-10:30 HP
10:45-11:30 IBM
11:30-12:15 Voltaire
12:15-13:15 Lunch
13:15-14:00 Dell
14:00-14:45 Microsoft
14:45-15:30 Sun
15:45-16:30 AMD Opteron™ processors scalability and roadmap (Herve Chevanne, AMD)
16:30-17:00 Putting Personality into High-Performance Computing (John D. Leidel, Convey Computer Corporation)
17:00-17:30 Gateway Technology
17:30-18:00 DataDirect Networks
18:00-18:30 Advancements in Copper Cable Interconnects for HPC Applications (Russell Hornung and
Henry N.Yates II, W.L. Gore & Associates)
18:30-18:45 Adjourn and prize raffle!

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Green HPC ?

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

The importance of power consumption and green IT are increasing also for HPC. From Bernard Aebischer of the Centre for Energy Policy & Economics at ETH Zurich (CEPE) I received a message with interesting links related to this topic. I just forward his mail in this post (see here below, in German).

Bernard in addition pointed to the Green IT Innovation Award“. There is still time to participate with a project. It seems that only a few projects have been posted, so there are good chances to win a price… You can find additional information on http://www.green-it-award.ch/upload/dokumente/CallForInnovation_def_DE.pdf and www.green-it-award.ch

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Sehr geehrte Damen, sehr geehrte Herren, liebe KollegInnen,

Alle relevanten Informationen zu US Energy Star für Data Centres und für Servers finden sich auf der Website http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=prod_development.server_efficiency .

Betreffend Data Centres möchte ich hervorheben:

  1. die Ankündigung „Data Center Industry Leaders Reach Agreement on Guiding Principles for Energy Efficiency Metrics” vom 1. Februar 2010: http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/downloads/DataCenters_AgreementGuidingPrinciples.pdf
  2. die Präsentation “ENERGY STAR for Data Centers” at The Green Grid Technical Forum, February 2, 2010: http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/downloads/DataCenters_GreenGrid02042010.pdf .

Zu den Servern empfehle ich.

  1. das Paper von Fanara/Haines/Howard „The State of Energy and Performance Benchmarking for Enterprise Servers” http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/downloads/State_of_Energy_and_Performance_Benchmarking_for_Enterprise_Servers_Final.pdf
  2. die Präsentation “ENERGY STAR Servers. Version 2.0: Updates” at The Green Grid Technical Forum 2010 San Jose, CA February 2, 2010 http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/revisions/downloads/computer_servers/ES_Servers_V_2.0_Development_Update.pdf
  3. Detailinformationen zur Vorbereitung der Version 2 für Server finden sich auf: http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=revisions.computer_servers

Auf der Website http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=new_specs.new_prod_specs finden sich alle neuen Gerätetypen für welche eine Energy Star Spezifikation in Vorbereitung ist. Von besonderem Interesse sind Data Center Storage und UPS.

Auch für Data Centre Storage wurde für das Green Grid Technical Forum 2010 eine Übersichtspräsentation zusammengestellt: http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/new_specs/downloads/storage/ES_Data_Center_Storage_V_1.0_Development_Update.pdf . Für Experten ist die Anleitung zur Datensammlung, auf der die Spezifikationen basieren werden, interessant: http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/new_specs/downloads/storage/StorageInitialDataCollectionProcedure.pdf

Ganz neu ist die Initiative für UPS: http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=new_specs.uninterruptable_power_supplies . Die beiden unter dem Titel „February 16, 2010 — Uninterruptible Power Supplies Specification Framework Document“ hinterlegten Dokumente „Cover Memo“ und „UPS Framework Document“ enthalten alle relevanten Informationen.

Mit freundlichen Grüssen,

Bernard Aebischer

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HP2C Presented at the Hybrid Multicore Consortium

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Prof. Thomas Schulthess presented the HP2C initiative at the First Workshop of the Hybrid Multicore Consortium in San Francisco (January, January 20, 2010).

Have a look to the different presentations of the consortium members and in particular to the presentation of HP2C by Schulthess.

As stated in the presentation, the overarching goal of HP2C is to:

Prepare computational sciences to make effective use of next generation supercomputers

And the specific goal is to:

Emerge with several high-impact scientific applications that scale and run efficiently on leadership computing platforms in 2012/13 timeframe

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University of Lausanne Joins HPC-CH Community

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

We are happy to announce that University of Lausanne is joining the hpc-ch community as a guest. The university will be represented in the community by Hamid Hussain-Khan of the Centre informatique.

The University of Lausanne is running itself only a small HPC system besides the private ones hosted by its research institutes (for this reason it is participating in hpc-ch as a guest and non as a full member). The needs of their research groups are covered either by Vital-IT in the field of life sciences or by the project Cadmos hosted at EPF Lausanne.

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Installation of the Phoenix Upgrade for CHIPP

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

In January 2010 started at CSCS the upgrade of the cluster “Phoenix” that is being used as tier 2 by the Swiss Institute of Particle Physics (CHIPP) in the LHC experiment at CERN.  The Swiss commitment in 3 of the 4 large LHC experiments (ATLAS, CMS and LHCb) mandates establishing their own Grid computing infrastructure for performing LHC physics data analysis in Switzerland.

The previous system based on SunBlade 8000 for the Compute Notes, SF_X4200 M2 machines with 2.8 GHz AMD processors for the Service Nodes and SF_X4500 for the Storage Nodes with our ZFS-Solaris Technology has been running now for 3 years and an upgrade and expansion was necessary.

The new HPC system is based on a Gigabit Ethernet network and an additional Infiniband network based on QDR technology with the Sun Datacenter Infiniband Switch 648 and uses Lustre as parallel file system. The worker nodes are base on Sun X6275 blade server, based on the new Intel X5500 processor generation (Nehalem, 2.53 GHz, Quad-Core, 8MBCache).

The hardware has been delivered beginning January, 2010 and will be functional in March, 2010. The old compute nodes will be decomissioned by mid year.

In the next picture you can follow the assembling of the system in the first month.

The truck delivering the hardware beginning of January at a sunny day in Manno.

The boxes with the delivered hardware in the CSCS computing room.

Unloading of the racks that can up to 1′080 kg heavy.

Christoph Grab (CHIPP)  inspects the location of the upgrade of Phoenix (which is next to the existing system).

The first QDR InfiniBand cables (in blue) are connected to the IB fabric. Because they are very fragile, the cables are suspended to the deck and not running in the raised floor.

The sysadmins of Phoenix Jason and Fotis are getting ready to take over the new system.

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