Radio HPC #3: Force10 Networks, Sun xVM Ops Center, and HPC News

In this episode of the Radio HPC podcast, Tony Warner and his guests bring us the latest high performance computing news from Sun Microsystems. In a special Partner segment, Debbie Montano from Force10 Networks talks about their extreme innovation for ethernet connectivity. Plus, Sun's Prasad Pai gives us the scoop on Sun xVM Ops Center software for systems and cluster management. Download the MP3 file or subscribe today on iTunes.

Related Links:

* Sun HPC Community Portal - Events and Community News
* Video presentations from the Lustre User Group, April, 2008
* Sun HPC Consortium, Dresden, Germany, June 15-17

News Stories

* Sun Rolls out Quad-Core AMD servers
* Sun Releases Grid Engine 6.2 Beta Binaries
* Andy Bechtolsheim to Keynote Sun HPC Consortium

Solution Sheet: Sun and MCAE

Numerical simulation of real world physics is a compute intensive task. For manufacturing companies, the more simulations that can be performed, or the fidelity of the simulation that can be performed, can help to get products to market faster. Simulating how a product performs, under real world conditions and physics, leads to an optimized final product design. Full Story

TACC Ranger to Reconstruct the Reionization Era

Michael L. Norman, distinguished professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego and director of the Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics is one of the biggest users of CPU cycles on the planet. And when his simulation is completed on the Sun-powered TACC Ranger supercomputer this summer, it will be the largest cosmological calculation ever done:

"It wasn’t until the advent of Ranger, however, that it became possible to add the radiative transfer equations to ENZO, Norman insisted. “It’s a very computationally intensive piece of physics that really requires Ranger's computer power to do.” Full Story

How Grid Computing Works

Jonathan Strickland has written a great primer on Grid Computing at the How Stuff Works site:

"The grid computing concept isn't a new one. It's a special kind of distributed computing. In distributed computing, different computers within the same network share one or more resources. In the ideal grid computing system, every resource is shared, turning a computer network into a powerful supercomputer. With the right user interface, accessing a grid computing system would look no different than accessing a local machine's resources. Every authorized computer would have access to enormous processing power and storage capacity." Full Story

YouTube: Building an Open Storage Community

In this video, Sun's Matthew Baier talks about the new Open Storage Community with Lynn Rohrer.

Video: Grid & Cluster State of the Union by Fritz Ferstl

~20 mins.

In this video, Fritz Ferstl, Director of Sun Grid Engineering and HPC on Solaris, keynotes the Open Source Grid & Cluster Confernence. Download the iPod video version 

YouTube: Quad-core Sun Fire x64 Server Walk-through

This walk-through video describes the new Sun Fire X4140, Sun Fire X4240, Sun Fire X4440 servers powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, delivering market-leading energy-efficiency, density, and scalability.

Andy Bechtolsheim on Open Storage Townhall

In this video, Sun's Andy Bechtolsheim, Matt Baier, and Jeff Bonwick join John Fowler to discuss advancements in Open Storage.

YouTube: New Sun x64 Systems with Quad-Core Processors

This video showcases the new Sun Fire X4140, Sun Fire X4240, Sun Fire X4440 servers powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. Sun Fire servers deliver market-leading energy-efficiency, density, and scalability.

Announcing Grid Engine 6.2 Beta Binaries

Grid Engine 6.2 Beta courtesy binaries are now ready for download.

Grid Engine 6.2, which has undergone significant changes in qmaster to significantly improve its scalability in challenging environments, adds powerful features to the core system, introduces multi cluster support for the Accounting and Reporting Console (ARCo) and comes with a new module extending the scope of Grid Engine to a new domain of use cases: the Service Domain Manager (SDM), aka. project Hedeby allows to dynamically (re-)assign computational resources on demand.

What's new in Grid Engine 6.2

Service Domain Manager
New in Grid Engine "core" and Accounting and Reporting Console (ARCo)
Moving Grid Engine documentation set to http://wikis.sun.com

The courtesy binaries are available at:

http://gridengine.sunsource.net/project/gridengine/downloads/62/download.html

Photo gallery: Lustre User Group 2008

A photo gallery has been posted from the recent Lustre User Group meeting. Videos and slides from the meeting are also available from Lustre.org.

The Lustre File System is also available for a free download.

This Week on the Sun HPC Community Portal

This Week on the Sun HPC Community Portal

Videos:
* FlexRex: New Cartoon on the HPC Portal
* Peter Bojanic presents a Lustre Community Update at the Lustre User Group
* Makia Minich presents on the Giraffe HPC Stack

Blogs:
* HPC User Forum: Josh Simons at the Operating System Panel
* New Facebook Community on Sun HPC

Events:
* Open Source Grid & Cluster Conference, Oakland, CA, May 12-16
* Design Automation Conference, Los Angeles, CA, June 8-13
* Sun HPC Consortium, Dresden, Germany, June 15-17
* International Supercomputing Conference ISC08, Dresden, Germany, June 17-20

ISC'08 Newsletter

The latest newsletter from the International Supercomputing Conference ISC'08 is out with these headlines:

- Cluster Session Overview
- After-Hours Social Events
- Hurry Up and Save: Online Advance Registration Ends May 19

There is still time to register for Early-bird rates for the Sun HPC Consortium, which will take place June 15-17 in Dresden just prior to ISC. Registration site

AMD Expands Charter for OpenSolaris and Sun xVM

AMD announced that its Operating System Research Center (OSRC) has expanded its focus to include optimization and tuning advancements for Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris Operating System and Sun xVM Virtualization family of products. This extends AMD’s commitment to work together with technology software partners to ensure that their OS and virtualization software layers are optimized to leverage AMD processor-based platforms’ features. By expanding research and development on the OpenSolaris Operating System, the ORSC expects to help drive increased Solaris OS performance for business customers as well as feature enhancements on AMD Opteron processor-based systems.

“Sun and AMD share a long history of technology collaboration. This next step at the OSRC represents an even deeper commitment on the part of both companies to ensure that our respective technologies work in concert to deliver customers the highest performance possible on our systems,” said Earl Stahl, vice president, Software Development, AMD. “We know that Solaris is a key enterprise-class OS for mission critical applications while the xVM family of products addresses desktop and server virtualization for the enterprise and data center with high availability, scalability, performance and management. AMD is a strong supporter of open source and will be a contributing member of the OpenSolaris community.” Full Story

Data Centers Becoming Biggest Polluters

The world’s data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020, according to a new study by McKinsey & Co.

"The report also lists 10 “game-changing improvements” intended to double data center efficiency, ranging from using virtualization software to integrated control of cooling units. “It clearly makes more sense to become more efficient than to build another $100 million data center,” said Kenneth Brill, executive director of the Uptime Institute." Full Story

For more information on Sun's efforts to Green the datacenter, check out our site on Eco-responsibility.

Utility Computing Great for Startups

Now that Utility Computing is coming of age, it turns out that entrepreneurial firms are the best customers, and that may drive a new class of innovative companies to market:

"It turns out the sweet spot is startup firms. Many business ideas never get off the ground because entrepreneurs can’t raise the $100,000 or more needed for capital investment in computers." Full Story

Sun CEO: HPC Is Here to Stay

At the recent Web 2.0 Expo, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz said HPC is alive and well, noting that he sells Sun gear to newer Web 2.0 companies that ask for large multiprocessor systems to scale their businesses.

Schwartz also cast aside the idea that companies just want several one-way "pizza box" servers.

"All horizontal scale, ultimately, scales vertically," he said.

To that end, Schwartz said that while the perception is that Internet-focused companies use those one-socket servers, their average node is a four-way platform, which carries a lot of computing power when running Sun’s eight-core UltraSPARC T1 and T2 chips.

"To me, that looks like a 32-way computer. And by the way, when you sit down and talk to folks at companies like Facebook, they start talking to you about high-performance computing to interpolate and interrogate the social graph, and they all of a sudden need terabit switching,” he said. “So I think we're seeing a very interesting shift from how do we simply serve the Web to how do we run analytics against it." Full Story

Sun Talks MCAE in China

Michael Schulman from Sun Microsystems gave a keynote presentation on Sun Infrastructure Solutions for MCAE at the recent Pera Global conference in Shanghai, China.

From left to right - Stephen Perrenod (Sun Microsystems), Wang Hua Qian (Pera Global), Michael Schulman (Sun Microsystems), Liu Zhao (MDCL Frontline), George Lan (Sun Microsystems). Here's a link to our friends at the MDCL-FRONTLINE group.

Why aren't more companies doing HPC?

Two new studies by the Council of Competitiveness examine why more companies aren't embracing HPC technology:

"There's a real opportunity to make modeling and simulation a national best practice. I think that's something we have to start thinking about as a country." -- Suzy Tichenor, Vice President, Council on Competitiveness Full Story

HPC Innovation in the Era of 'Good Enough'

According to this story by John E. West, the HPC market wants leading-edge innovation but remains unwilling to pay for it's development:

"There are two forces working against robust R&D in HPC. First, investment in research for high end computation has remained lackluster even while industry groups and a series of blue ribbon government panels have repeatedly identified the need for increased funding and coordination. Without external funding for computation-centric R&D, vendors in HPC have been left to fund innovation on business margins alone."

I think John makes a good point here; the HPC market has an excellent track record of putting innovative companies out of business. Full Story

This Week on HPC Community Portal

Here's what you might have missed this week on the Sun HPC Community Portal:

Videos and Podcasts:
Radio HPC Podcast #2: AMD Fires Up and New Sun Storage and Archive Solution
Video: Rock's Transactional Memory (51:49)
Video: Project Fortress at Sun Labs (38:43)

Blogs:
Sun Rolls Out Storage & Archive Solution for HPC
New OpenSolaris Project: Visualization for HPC
HPC User Forum: Josh Simons at the Interconnect Panel
Darryl Gove: Solaris Application Programming in Second life
Free Download of Lustre File System

Events:
Open Source Grid & Cluster Conference, Oakland, May 12-16
Sun HPC Consortium, Dresden, June 15-17

New OpenSolaris Project: Visualization for HPC

The OpenSolaris site has added a new project on Visualization for HPC.

In this context, visualization is the process of converting large amounts of complex, multi-dimensional data into images so people can more quickly and easily see patterns and anomalies in the data. Visualization technologies are widely used within the HPC community to enable better understanding of the ever larger data sets that computer simulations and sensor networks are creating.

The OpenSolaris Visualization Project has three primary goals:

1. Provide tools for building visualization server systems that can handle these massive amounts of data with sufficient performance. Many tools for scalable visualization (defined as harnessing the capability of multiple graphics devices to deal with very large data sets) are available in the open source community, primarily deployed on Linux and Windows platforms. One goal of the Visualization project on opensolaris.org is to provide a complete integrated and tuned stack of software for scalable visualization on Solaris.

2. Provide easy access for any user anywhere to such systems, the programs these systems run, and the images they produce. These users can use many different types of client systems—Sun Ray™ thin clients, notebook and desktop PCs and Macs, and workstations. A second goal of the proposed visualization project is to provide software for enabling remote visualization and collaboration.

3. Provide additional visualization applications and tools for building, analyzing, or tuning visualization applications on Solaris. Full Story

Behind the Myths of Cloud Computing

According to Gartner analysts Daryl Plummer and Thomas Bittman, there are still a lot of myths around Cloud Computing:

According to Gartner cloud computing is “a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ across the Internet to multiple external customers.” Full Story

AMD's V12 compute engine

As reported on DailyTech, AMD is talking about developments that will lead first to six-core processors, followed by a twin-die package that will put 12 cores in a socket:

"A twin-die Istanbul processor could enable 12 cores in a single package. Each of these cores will communicate to each other via the now-enabled HT3.0 interconnect on the processor."

Tip of the hat to Inside HPC for finding this story. Full Story

ISC'08 Newsletter Issued

The latest newsletter for the International Supercomputing Conference has been released with the following items of interest:

- HPC Requirements for the Automotive Industry
- Panel Discussion: “Is HPC Going Green?”
- Save Now: Online Advance Registration Ends May 19