Whitepaper: Accelerating Performance for Data-Intensive HPC Workflows

A new whitepaper provides a guide to open storage solutions for data-intensive HPC environments and gives you an update on trends and challenges in delivering the necessary I/O throughput for HPC applications.

You'll also learn about why open storage solutions are important to HPC and how Sun is utilizing open storage technologies to benefit HPC customers:

* Flash Technology
* Network Storage
* Parallel Storage
* Archive Storage

Sun provides a wide range of cost-effective options for HPC storage performance, helping customers improve throughput for HPC applications while reducing costs. Download whitepaper

Andy Bechtolsheim to Keynote Sun HPC Consortium Portland, Nov 14-15

Sun co-founder and Chief Architect Andy Bechtolsheim will keynote the Sun HPC Consortium in Portland on November 15.

This year, the Consortium has a terrific lineup of hot HPC topics including: Power and Cooling, Cluster Storage, HPC Virtualization, Data Management, Flash Performance, and HPC Interconnects.

Who should attend: All Sun scientific, engineering, or research computing customers or anyone interested in high-performance computing on Sun technologies. Each meeting is designed to address a wide range of interests from application developers to CIOs and VPs of Research. Registration Site.

SC09 Newsletter

The latest SC09 newsletter is out with these headlines:

* SC Your Way Serves as a One-Stop Resource for Attendees
* How do I get to the Oregon Convention Center?
* Details Available for the Al Gore Keynote on Thursday, November 19
* Participate in the Sustainable Conference Experiment
* SCinet - the Most Powerful Network in the World at Your Fingertips
* Experience a Sold-Out Exhibition Floor This Year
* What's the Weather?

While you're at SC09 in Portland, be sure to check out these Sun events:

• Hear CTO's discuss Flash Technology in a Panel session on Friday, Nov. 20
  
• Learn how to Solve the HPC I/O bottleneck at the Exhibitor's Forum
  
• Share the secrets of data integrity at the Birds of a Feather Session
  
• Learn about Jülich Research on Petaflops Architectures Project
  

• Participate in the Sun HPC Consortium November 14-15.

  Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( November 09, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]

Coming to SC09? Help us Tweet it Up!

Attending SC09? Help us Tweet Up the show! John West over at Inside HPC has the details:

"A bunch of you attending SC09 this year will have netbooks/cellphones/laptops/cranial implants that allow you to Twitter in real time. I hope you’ll take advantage of the opportunity to give others at the show — and those that cannot attend — insights into what you are learning and experiencing throughout the week. See a really cool technology, or even a company that’s bound to fail? Tweet it!

To make sure that everyone’s comments are easy to follow, the SC09 conference is encouraging the use of the #sc09 hashtag. As we often do for large events in the community, insideHPC will be including the stream for the #sc09 hashtag right on the website, so you won’t have to go far to learn what everyone at the show is up to."

Sound complicated? It's not really. Just add these five characters: #sc09 to your SC09 twitter entries and InsideHPC aggregate it all in one place. Full Story

Saratov State University Developing Curriculum on Sun HPC Software

Grid Dynamics, the global leader in scaling mission-critical systems, today announced it is working with Sun Microsystems and Saratov State University (SSU), to develop a new course of study in high-performance computing (HPC) at SSU, which is one of Russia’s oldest and most respected universities. Full Story

Video: ZFS, Cache, and Flash

Sun's Adam Leventhal presents on ZFS, Cache, and Flash at the Open Storage Summit 2009.

Video: Sun HPC Renders Ice Age III

Now on DVD, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs was rendered on a new Sun server farm consisting of Sun Blade 6250 Server Modules mounted in 10 Sun Blade 6048 Chassis. Learn more about it in this video.

Storage Networking: The Basics

Our favorite storage pundit Henry Newman has written a nice primer on Storage Networking:

"The storage stack is complex because it really has not changed much over the last 20 years and yet there have been huge changes in our industry. The move from Fibre Channel and other connectivity options to 10GbE is designed to reduce complexity and break the model of having networking administration separated from storage administration both from a hardware perspective and from a personnel perspective. If you are a network administrator, I would strongly recommend learning something about storage, and if you are a SAN administrator, I would strongly recommend learning something about networking." Full Story

Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Storage] ( November 04, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]

Benchmark: Sun Ultra 27 Single Frame Buffer SPECviewperf 10 Results

Yes, Sun still makes high performance workstations. The BestPerf blog describes how a Sun Ultra 27 workstation configured with an nVidia FX5800 graphics card delivered outstanding performance running the SPECviewperf® 10 benchmark. Full Story

Video: Lustre Development Roadmap

In this video, Peter Bojanic provides a quick update on the Lustre development roadmap. Recorded August 17, 2009.

For more information on Lustre, download the Blueprint Article Solving the HPC I/O Bottleneck: Sun Lustre Storage System.

Video: eXludus - Making Multi-core Systems Perform

In this video, Dale Geldart from eXludus Technologies presents on the company's MultiCore Optimizer middleware.

Video: Sun Solutions for Government, Education, and Research

Michael Schulman presents on Sun HPC solutions for Government, Education, and Research.

Video: F5100 Flash Array at Oracle Open World

Paul Riethmuller shows us the new Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array at Oracle Open World 2009.

Optimizing Simulations with Intel Flash and Oracle and MSC Software

Larry Mcintosh and Dale Layfield demonstrate the performance advantages of SSDs at Oracle Open World.

New whitepaper: Tuning Parallel Code on Solaris - Lessons Learned from HPC

Most computers today are equipped with multicore processors and manufacturers are increasing core and thread counts, as the most cost effective and energy efficient route to increased processing throughput. However, tuning parallel applications brings with it complex challenges that can only be overcome with increasingly advanced tools and techniques.

The set of tools needed to achieve this goal was expanded continuously in each successive version of the Solaris OS, culminating in Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris with DTrace — arguably the most advanced observability tool available today in any operating environment. Learn by example about the tools available in Solaris and how they can be applied to determine where problems lie with parallel code and then how to figure them out. Download PDF

Sun Benchmarks Reverse Time Migration

Just in time for SEG comes news of Sun's outstanding performance on Reverse Time Migration:

"A Sun Blade 6048 Modular System with 12 Sun Blade X6275 server modules were clustered together with QDR InfiniBand and using a Lustre File System with QDR InfiniBand to show performance improvements over an NFS file system for reading in Velocity, Epsilon, and Delta Slices and imaging 800 samples of various various grid sizes using the Reverse Time Migration. Full Story

and

"A prominent Seismic Processing algorithm, Reverse Time Migration with Optimal Checkpointing, in SMP "THREADS" Mode, was testing using a Sun Fire X4270 server configured with four high performance 15K SAS hard disk drives (HDDs) and a Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array. This benchmark compares I/O devices for checkpointing wave state information while processing a production seismic migration. Full Story

Video: Sun Solutions for Computational Chemisty

Michael Brown presents an overview of Sun HPC Solutions for Computational Chemisty.

Video: Ansys for Engineering Simulation

Barbara Hutchings describes how Ansys parallel performance provides faster turnaround time and the ability to run bigger, more detailed models. Download the Sun Blueprint: Sun Business Ready HPC for ANSYS FLUENT.

Video: Active Archive Solution for Life Sciences Research

Mark Leggott, University Librarian for the University of PEI, presents on the System Architecture for Sun's Active Archive Solution for Life Sciences Research.

Sun SC09 Preview

The web team has just posted a preview of Sun Sessions at SC09:

• Hear CTO's discuss Flash Technology in a Panel session on Friday, Nov. 20
  
• Learn how to Solve the HPC I/O bottleneck at the Exhibitor's Forum
  
• Share the secrets of data integrity at the Birds of a Feather Session
  
• Learn about Jülich Research on Petaflops Architectures Project
  

• Participate in the Sun HPC Consortium: Early Bird Rates end today! 

  Posted by Rich Brueckner [Sun HPC Events] ( October 23, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]

Fortress Presentation

Josh Simons blogs on the Fortress programming language for HPC. With Fortress, programmer/scientists express their algorithms in a mathematical notation that is much closer to their domain of expertise than the syntax of the typical programming language.

New Software Could Smooth HPC Speed Bumps

With all the buzz on GPUs these days, programming these devices remains a big issue:

"Now, this is changing as AMD, NVIDIA and their customers (primarily computer- and game system–makers) throw their support behind a standard way of writing software called the Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which works across both GPU brands. A longer-term goal behind OpenCL is to create a common programming interface that will even let software writers create applications that run both GPUs and CPUs with few modifications, cutting the time and effort required to harness supercomputing power for scientific endeavors." Full Story

Sun and Voltaire Accelerate Clemson Computational Center

This Desktop Engineering article describes the HPC cluster at CU-CMS. Sun Microsystems delivered and installed a 35 teraflop system based on 43 Sun Blade 6000 Modular Systems, Sun Fire servers and Sun StorageTek systems.

"To help attract leading companies from the automotive industry as well as other industries such as energy, aviation, and aerospace, Clemson University selected Voltaire’s scaleout computing fabric solutions as the interconnect for the high-performance computing (HPC) system operated by the Clemson University Computational Center for Mobility Systems (CU-CCMS). The system enables the university to provide simulation test research to automotive and transportation companies that need to reduce overall design cycle times to develop better products faster and at a lower cost. Full Story

HPC Customers Weigh in on Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array

HPC Wire cites some glowing customer quotes from Sun HPC customers on the performance of the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array. Don Thorp, Operations Manager at SDSC had this to say:

"San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has been evaluating the F5100 Flash Storage array as a high performance SamQFS metadata target, which sits at the core of our archiving services and hosts well over one hundred million files. Performance improvement of 2.5 to four times was demonstrated for file creation and metadata scans, such as listing and backups. Further testing will be done using the Sun Storage F5100 as a Lustre metadata target, high speed storage pool in Lustre 2.0 for user checkpoint data, Oracle database storage device and out-of-core storage device on an HPC cluster." Full Story

Vote: HPC Community Leadership Awards

Democracy reigns in the HPC community. Here is your chance to recognize the leaders that drive high performance computing:

insideHPC’s HPC Community Leadership Awards. The award recognizes the people and organizations who have persevered through technology, budget or organizational challenges to place innovative HPC solutions in the hands of users in business, engineering, technology, and science.

Not to be left out, the HPCwire Reader's Choice Awards allow the HPC community to recognize some of the most outstanding organizations and individuals in the industry. This year, two new categories were added: "Best Use of HPC in the Cloud" and "Best Application of Green Computing in HPC" in recognition of the tremendous amount of innovation happening in the industry. The Readers' Choice Awards are determined by a poll of HPCwire readers, and the Editors' Choice Awards are determined by a panel of recognized HPC luminaries and contributing editors from industry. All winners will be announced at the SC09 in Portland, Oregon. Vote Here