Inside HPC Launches Green HPC Podcast

Our friends at Inside HPC have launched a Green HPC podcast series:

"In the inaugural episode of the Green HPC podcast series we will examine the issues that datacenter managers and system designers are facing with high performance computing systems of all sizes today. Even if you aren’t “green at heart,” there are very practical and compelling reasons why a growing awareness of energy use in your datacenter — how much, where it goes, and what it costs you — is critical to your success." Listen to Podcast or just read the transcript.

Posted by Rich Brueckner [Videos and Podcasts] ( July 03, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]

Video: Performance Tuning - An Introduction to Parallel Programming

In order to help developers and engineers meet the challenges posed by parallel programming, Sun Microsystems is offering a series of seminars called "An Introduction to Parallel Programming" discussing parallel programming as a fundamental of application development. In this episode, Sun's Ruud van der Pas kicks things off with a presentation on performance tuning.

For more information on HPC Application Development, check out this helpful Developer Resource page.

Webcast: Flash Technology Revolution in HPC

Join us for an extraordinary panel session that you just won't want to miss. In this eSeminar from Sun Microsystems, hosted by Tech Target, leading technical experts will discuss Flash technology and it's effect in the HPC environment.

The inexorable availability of ever more CPU cores, and even more GFLOPS per core, mean HPC application performance will no longer be restricted by the CPU - but by getting data into and out of these fast processors. I/O has always lagged behind computation, being ultimately dependent on disk drives throttled by rotational rates limited by mechanical physics. With an exponential growth spurt of peak GFLOPs available to HPC system designers and users, the CPU performance to I/O gap will reach increasingly gaping proportions.

To bridge this gap, Flash is being deployed in HPC environments as a revolutionary technology that delivers faster time to solution for HPC applications at significantly lower costs and lower power consumption than traditional disk based infra-structures.

View this one of a kind eSeminar panel discussion to discover more about flash technology from Sun Microsystems, Verari Systems, Fusion-io and Spansion. Hear first hand from these CTO's about flash technology and what it could do for your HPC environment. Launch Webcast

Interview with Andy Bechtolsheim

The publication "Spektrum der Wissenschaft” (the German sister publication of Scientific American) sits down with Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim to talk about all things HPC:

"There have been very few major breakthroughs in mathematics and theory in the last twenty-five years that affected the field of computer science. All the new advances that we have seen were really based on better engineering." Full Story

Building a Sun HPC Virtual Cluster

The Savannah blog provides detailed instructions on building a Sun HPC Virtual Cluster:

"This tutorial illustrates the procedure of utilizing Sun HPC software stack, Linux Edition 2.0 and Sun xVM Virtual Box to set up a High Performance Computing development platform on a moderate laptop. We demonstrated a complete open source solution for HPC software developers who has no access to computer clusters and proprietary softwares. All of software components in Sun HPC software stack, Linux Edition are exactly as same as those running on world leading supercomputers. We hope more and more HPC software developers could take advantage of such a "mobile" development platform in their projects. We will also be eager to receive feedbacks and wishlists for the future Sun HPC software stack releases. Download the Sun HPC software stack and Join the community today!" Full Story

Now Available: Rocks On Solaris

As reported on Inside HPC, Rocks now does Solaris:

"The Rocks Cluster Toolkit development team officially announced the latest release of their widely-used cluster management stack. Version 5.2 of Rocks went live for i386 and X86_64 Linux and x86_64 Solaris. What!? Did I say Solaris!? Indeed, the Rocks Cluster Toolkit now officially supports deploying Solaris as a compute node option for your cluster." Full Story

In this video, SDSC builds a live, 128-node Rocks cluster in the Sun booth at SC2003.

Sun HPC Consortium in a Nutshell

Josh Simons has a great writeup on the Sun HPC Consortium that wrapped up this week in Hamburg:

"Our first customer talk on Monday was given by Prof. Dr. Thomas Lippert head of the Jülich Supercomputing Center(JCS), site of Sun's largest European deployment to date of our Sun Constellation System architecture. He first gave a brief history of the Jülich Research Center, which is one of the largest civilian research centers in Europe with over 4000 researchers in nine departments, one of which is the new Institute for Advanced Simulation of which JCS is a part. The site has a very long history of computer acquisitions, starting in 1957. This year JCS purchased three systems: a Sun system (JuRoPa), a Bull system (HPC-FF), and an IBM system (Jugene.) These systems have, respectively, 200 TFLOPs, 100 TFLOPs, and 1 PFLOPs of peak performance. Since the Sun and Bull systems are interconnected at the highest level of their switch hierarchies, the two machines can be run as a single system. This combined system delivered 274.8 TFLOPs on LINPACK which earned it the #10 entry on the latest edition of the TOP500 list. Collectively, JCS serves about 250 projects across Europe, including 20-30 highly scalable projects that are chosen by international referees for their potential for producing breakthrough science." Full Story

Sun buffs InfiniBand for Constellation supers

The Register takes a look at the recent enhancements to the Sun Constellation System:

"To be fair, the Constellation boxes have been a bright spot for Sun, which is finally getting some play on the Top 500 list of supercomputers. About a quarter of the petaflops that Sun has shipped or that are on order for Constellation boxes come from one machine, the "Ranger" Constellation box at the University of Texas, with a few other big deals contributing tens of teraflops on top of that. Constellation needs a lot more sales, as do Sun's generic rack and blade servers for customers who don't want to adopt InfiniBand and who might prefer cheap Gigabit Ethernet or alternative 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching." Full Story

Sun HPC Software, Developer Edition 1.0 for OpenSolaris

Yesterday we announced Sun HPC Software, Developer Edition 1.0 for OpenSolaris, which provides a pre-configured, integrated development environment to enable developers to quickly and efficiently create, debug and deploy parallel applications. It takes advantage of virtualization for easy installation and seamlessly integrates with a cloud environment for extreme scalability.

At a Glance

- Fully featured HPC development environment distributed as a virtual machine (VM).
- Pre-configured as a grid enabled, virtual HPC cluster comprised of three OpenSolaris zones.
- Turn-key parallel application development environment with distributed resource management and cloud connectivity built in and ready to go.
- Sun Studio and Sun HPC ClusterTools come pre-installed and configured, providing Fortran, C and C++ compilers, MPI libraries, performance analysis and debugging tools, high performance scientific libraries and an intuitive IDE for application development.
- Sample applications are included in the installation to get you up and running quickly. Full Story

Photos from ISC'09

The thing I love about ISC is that they start the thing off with a big beer party in the exhibit hall. As a result, the Sun Booth was standing room only on opening night.

The band was rocking out at the opening reception. Listen to the Sax player jamming away.

Prasad Pai explains the inner workings of Sun xVM Ops Center

The new "M9" Sun Datacenter Switch 648 drew a lot of attention.

Michael Brown shows off the new Sun Blade 6048 InfiniBand QDR Switched Network Express Module.

Larry Mcintosh and Dale Layfield show Peter Bojanic our SSD demo in the Intel booth. You can read Larry's blueprint article: SSDs in HPC: Reducing the I/O Bottleneck.

A German Don Juan serenades our own Kim Gerton.

Sun Constellation System Steps Up with M9

Sun is announcing new products today that demonstrate continued innovation and expansion of the Sun Constellation System. Designed using Sun's Open Network Systems architecture, the Sun Constellation System is one of the most integrated and balanced HPC system available today. Full Story

Highlights include:

Sun Datacenter InfiniBand QDR Switch 648: Delivers extreme density, performance and reduced deployment complexity with up to three times more ports per rack, four and a half times more system bandwidth, and up to 3:1 cable reduction than competitive Double Data Rate (DDR) switch solutions.

Sun HPC Software, Linux Edition 2.0: Makes it faster and easier to install Linux-based environments by providing an integrated Linux software stack for HPC solutions, and gives customers a choice of running SUSE 10, CentOS and Red Hat Linux.

Lustre 1.8.: Introduces several robust new features to improve system performance and functionality, including the adaptive timeouts feature, client interoperability feature, OSS read cache feature and Version-based Recovery (VBR).

Survey: What do you want from Fortran?

The Sun Studio Fortran team would like your input. Please visit take our brief survey on future needs and priorities. Your input is key to our planning and we value your feedback.

Thank you, and happy coding.
The Sun Studio Fortran Team.

Sun Fire MSC NASTRAN results

As reported on Inside HPC, the Sun BestPerf blog posts performance results of the Sun Fire X2270 (with quad-core Xeon 5570s) running the MSC NASTRAN Vendor_2008 benchmark. SSD truly does accelerate performance. Full Story

Video: All About Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1

In this video, Len Wisniewski presents on Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1 at the HPC Consortium in Austin, Texas, November 2008.

The Sun HPC Consortium in Hamburg kicks off tomorrow. Watch this space for presentation videos on the latest HPC technologies from Sun and our partners!

SSDs in HPC: Reducing the I/O Bottleneck

This new Sun BluePrints article focuses on a comparison between traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) and the newer solid state drive (SSD) technology in high-performance computing (HPC) applications. SSD devices can help correct the imbalance between processor and storage speed while also reducing energy usage and environmental impact. This comparison was performed using two approaches:

Application-based benchmarking was performed using the ABAQUS, NASTRAN, and ANSYS finite-element analysis (FEA) applications, in order to evaluate the effect of SSD technology in realistic HPC applications. These applications are commonly used to benchmark HPC systems. Benchmark testing of storage performance using the Lustre™ parallel file system and the popular IOZone benchmark application was performed, in order to evaluate large sequential I/O operations typical for the Lustre file system employed as a compute cluster data cache. Full Story

OpenMP Workshop Presentations Online

Tutorial presentations are now online from the recent International Workshop on OpenMP. The IWOMP 2009 is an annual series of international workshops dedicated to the promotion and advancement of all aspects focusing on parallel programming with OpenMP. The workshop serves as a forum to present the latest research ideas and results related to this shared memory programming model. It also offers the opportunity to interact with OpenMP users, developers and people working on the next release of the standard.

To view the presentations, point your browser to the IWOMP Conference Site, click "Program" and then scroll down.

HPC Advisory Council Announces HPC Outreach Programs

A reported by Inside HPC, the HPC Advisory Council has announced a new series of programs and workshops in order to expand high performance computing in education, industry and scientific applications. For more info on the range of upcoming events and programs, read the full release here.

SC09 Opens Registration, Housing

SC09 registration is now open. The event takes place November 14-20 in Portland, Oregon. SC09 housing registration is now open as well. Book your hotel rooms early to get the location you want.

Sun employees: Sun plans to hold the Sun HPC Consortium on Nov. 14-15 in Portland and registration will open in early September. That's if, you know, things work out that way ;-)

Video: What's in the Future for SSD, Flash Technology?

In this video, Michael Cornwell, Sun Leading Flash Technologist, Jeff Bonwick, ZFS Inventor, and Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun Co-Founder, take a look at how Flash technology will affect the server industry.

Solid-State Drives (SSDs), or Flash drives, add value and savings when integrated in Sun Servers. Download now to read about it in the Business Value White Paper.

Video: SSD Turbocharges Your I/O Intensive Apps

In this video, Ray Austin discusses the performance advantages of flash technologies. Solid-State Drives (SSDs), or Flash drives, add value and savings when integrated in Sun Servers. Download now to read about it in the Business Value White Paper.

Video: Upgrading to Sun Grid Engine 6.2 While Keeping the Old Cluster

In this video, Lubomir Petrik demonstrates how to upgrade to Sun Grid Engine 6.2 while keeping your old cluster.

Announcing Sun Student Party, June 20 - Cafe Fees in Hamburg, Germany

Continuing the tradition started at SuperComputing '08 in Austin, Sun Microsystems will be hosting a party at ISC '09 for students with an interest in high-performance computing. The party is completely free and will include food, drinks, a DJ, give-aways, and a chance to get some 1-on-1 face time with Sun employees who are active in the field of high-performance computing. The party starts at 19:00 on Saturday (20th of June) at Cafe Fees. You can find more details at the Registration Site.

Help spread the word! We hope to see you there!

More Sun events at ISC are listed below.

Saturday, June 20

ISC'09 Student Event. Free student party sponsored by Sun Microsystems.

Sunday, June 21

* Sun HPC Consortium. HPC Customer/Partner event, Day 1.

Monday, June 22

* Sun HPC Consortium Day 2, featuring keynote by Andy Bechtolsheim.

Tuesday, June 23

* nVidia GPU Training Session 9:30am-11:00am, Hamburg Congress Centre.

* ISC keynote by Andy Bechtolsheim: 11:45-12:30 at Hall 3, convention center

* BoF: The Jülich Research on Petaflops Architectures, Axel Köhler, Sun, Prof. Dr. Thomas Lippert, Jülich, Gilad Shainer, Mellanox, 1:30-2:10

* Andreas Dilger: Novel Network Request Scheduler for a Large Scale Storage System, 15:00-15:30, Hamburg Congress Centre, Room B2.1

Wednesday, June 24

* Sun HPC Stack and Lustre BoF. 8:30am - 10:00am, Hamburg Congress Centre, Hall 18

* Marc Hamilton: System Architectures for Cloud Computing, Hall 3, 9:50-10:10

* Sun HPC Stack and Lustre Engineering Q&A . 1:30pm - 4:00pm, Hamburg Congress Centre, Hall 18

Thursday, June 25

* JuRoPA Supercomputer Special Session Guest speaker: Marc Hamilton. 7:30am – 8:45am / Hamburg Congress Centre Hall 3

* ISC Vendor Forum: Ikroop Dhillon presents Sun Studio, 10:00-10:30, Hamburg Congress Centre Hall C2.1

* ISC Hot Seat: Robert Murphy presents on Open Storage for HPC. 2:30-2:45, Hamburg Congress Centre Hall 3

Sun makes HPC Parallel Programming easy

Bruce Rothermal blogs that Sun is making it easy to get your feet wet with HPC and Cloud Computing:

"Sun developers have heard your wishes and made it easy for everyone wanting to learn how with HPC Developer Stack. Sun has put together a complete setup for development and testing of the software you want to create. Everything is combined in a single Virtual Machine Image. You can write the code in C, C++, Java, Fortran and many other scripting languages Bourne, bash, C-shell, tclsh, perl, python and more. The Virtual Machine Image uses Solaris Zones and SGE to give you a virtual grid computing system. Everything wrapped up in a single Virtual Image. So from a single laptop or desktop you have everything to get started." Full Story

HPC Radio Podcast: Game-changing Storage Technologies for HPC

In this episode of Radio HPC, Tony Warner and guests talk about why storage is so important to achieving real productivity gains in high performance computing.

Download MP3 or Subscribe on iTunes.

nVidia GPU Training Session, June 23, Hamburg, Germany

Coming to Hamburg for the ISC'09 conference? Sun Microsystems would like invite customers and partners to a special nVidia GPU Training Session at the Hamburg Congress Centre on Tuesday, June 23. Topics include: NVIDIA GPU Computing Ecosystem, Tesla line-up, CUDA programming.

There is limited space available, so Register today!