Archives for the month of: July, 2010

Dell HPC gets some love from Wall Street

29 July 2010 //
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Zack’s Investment Research is taking note of Dell’s HPC expertise and HPC product line.  After the announcement of Dell’s $5.1M upgrade at NASA’s National Center for Climate Science (NCCS), Zack’s had this to say about Dell’s HPC practice:

NASA’s involvement does signal growing interest in Dell’s expertise.

Dell’s HPC solutions are gaining popularity in universities and organizations keen on deploying upgraded technology for their research work.

They also mentioned the value of Dell’s PowerEdge C line of servers in HPC:

Dell’s HPC solutions are based on Intel Corp.’s Xeon Processors and facilitate designers, engineers and program developers to conduct research work faster and more efficiently.

Dell’s PowerEdge C6100 server, which is one of the HPC solutions, will empower NCCS to look into minute environmental details with the help of faster research and innovation, thereby reducing energy consumption.

On a personal note..  This is great news for our team.  It is great to be a part of HPC at Dell right now!  And as always, check out my other HPC blogs over at HPCatDell.com.

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Categories High Performance Computing

Multicore in HPC – Where will we stand in 10 years?

20 July 2010 //
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David Patterson over at IEEE Spectrum has written an article entitled “The Trouble With Multicore.” Kudos to David for a very thorough and well thought out article.  He gives plenty of background on how we arrived at multicore processors, and some of the techniques and challenges that come with parallel processing.  The advent of multicore processing was pretty much a gamble on the part of the semiconductor manufacturers, although their hand was forced due to the power wall associated with increased processor speeds:

“[In 2005] the semiconductor industry threw the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass when it switched from making microprocessors run faster to putting more of them on a chip—doing so without any clear notion of how such devices would in general be programmed. The hope is that someone will be able to figure out how to do that, but at the moment, the ball is still in the air.”

Achieving sustained parallel performance with application codes is a major effort.  In research and engineering communities, we have had increased success, but with that comes a major outlay of time and resources.  Here are a couple of choice quotes in the article that indicate the increased effort it takes to exploit multicore processors: Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories High Performance Computing

Storage Management with an LVM GUI

16 July 2010 //
1

One of my Dell HPC colleagues, Dr. Jeff Layton, has put together a great guide for getting started with Logical Volume Management on Linux.  LVM on UNIX based platforms has been around for a long time, but is relatively new (and now stable) on Linux within the last few years.

Over the years, I’ve used GUI volume managers on Solaris (Veritas), AIX (LVM), and HP-UX (SAM), but they were proprietary and expensive.  LVM on Linux is a great solution.  You may balk at using a GUI, but when you have your companies’ critical data on the line, there is nothing like “seeing” your volumes before you manipulate them.  For me, storage management was probably the most stressful part of UNIX/Linux system administration, because if you screwed up, you could lose data.  It is worthwhile to use all the tools at your disposal (even a GUI!) to make sure you aren’t, for instance, removing the wrong disk from the wrong logical volume.

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Categories Linux

HPC Design – Will You be Needing any Processors with your Cluster Today?

14 July 2010 //
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A recent article in IT Business Edge asks “Do Processors Really Matter Anymore?”  There is a statement in the article that got me thinking:

It would seem …  that the only users still focusing on clock speeds and overall processing capability are in the HPC market…


To this statement, I tend to disagree.  In HPC there is a focus on processors, but not so much on flops per core anymore.  There is a real concentration on how to leverage parallel computational resources in order to get your application to run efficiently.

Take a look at my comments over at HPCatDell.com.

What do you think?

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Categories High Performance Computing

Secret Astronauts

12 July 2010 //
1

A couple of years ago, the renowned PBS series Nova presented an episode entitled Astrospies.  In the 1960s, the US and Russia were in a race to get spies into space, while disguising their super-secret activities:

These men, 17 in all, were set to make history in space as the first military astronauts, performing covert reconnaissance from orbit. Yet while NASA’s astronauts were gracing magazine covers and signing autographs, the MOL teams were sworn to secrecy; most of the program’s details remain classified even today.

The public knew almost nothing about these programs, and the details have only come to light within recent years.  If you haven’t had the opportunity to watch this episode, it is definitely worth your time!

Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories Retrospective

Keeping your File Systems Available

8 July 2010 //
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File systems on your HPC cluster provide data storage to individual nodes, and entire subsets of nodes.  This is the home for your data and results, so lets keep it safe!  It is important to configure journaling, multiple data stores, and of course RAID.  Take a look at my tips for correctly configuring file systems on your cluster. Feel free to share your thoughts as well.

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Categories High Performance Computing
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