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.

Compiling Lustre from sources with OFED

Atul's Blog provides a nice recipe for compiling Lustre from source code with OFED:

"Many times I have been asked about how to build Lustre from sources. Though the Lustre Manual covers it, some details like selecting OFED distribution are missing." Full Story

Whitepaper: Extreme Scalability Using Sun Grid Engine

A new whitepaper is available for download: Extreme Scalability Using Sun Grid Engine.

As user data sets and computing needs increase in size and complexity, administrators are faced with building larger and more powerful clusters to keep pace. Some of the common practices in cluster administration fail to scale, and break down as cluster sizes grow. This white paper explains several best practices for building superscale clusters that utilize Sun Grid Engine software, and reveals other practices to avoid. Download

Univa Announces Integration With OpenSolaris

Univa UD recently announced the native OpenSolaris version of UniCluster, its leading HPC management product.

"Integration with the OpenSolaris Operating System (OS) will bring UniCluster capabilities to a vast new audience of users," says Gary Tyreman, senior vice president of products and alliances at Univa UD. "Univa is committed to providing the support needed across key end user software and systems such as the OpenSolaris OS to ensure technical computing customers have the capabilities they need." Full Story

Screencast: Run Time Memory Checking

In this screencast, David Ford presents on Runtime Checking in the Sun Studio debugger, which helps you understand how memory is being used in your application and identifies memory leaks and access errors.

Screencast: Thread Analyzer - Detecting Multithreaded Programming Errors

In this screencast, Xi Qian demonstrates how to detect data races and deadlocks in multithreaded applications.

Screencast: DLight - Utilize and Visualize the Power of DTrace Technology

In this screencast, Maria Tishkova demonstrates runtime profiling using DLight, which unifies application and system profiling using DTrace technology on Solaris platforms.

Screencast: Performance Analyzer - MPI Application Profiling

In this screencast, Yukon Maruyama demonstrates profiling of distributed MPI applications using Sun Studio.

Video: Parallel Architectures

Sun continues its video series: Introduction to Parallel Programming with this third segment on parallel architectures.
Module 1: Performance Tuning
Module 2: Multicore Processor Architectures

Screencast: Sun Studio Software: Developing OpenMP 3.0 Applications

Sun Studio 12u1 includes improved binary application performance, full OpenMP 3.0 support, profiling of distributed MPI applications, unified application and system profiling using Solaris DTrace technology (DLight), a new standalone graphical debugger (dbxTool) and much more!

In this screencast, Bin Fan demonstrates building, debugging and profiling an OpenMP 3.0 application, which utilizes OpenMP 3.0 tasking. Launch Screencast

Announcing Sun HPC Software, Linux Edition 2.0

We are pleased to announce the official release of the Sun HPC Software, Linux Edition 2.0 product. an integrated, open-source software solution for Sun HPC clusters. It simplifies the deployment of HPC clusters by providing a ready-made framework of software components to use to turn a bare-metal system into a running HPC cluster. It provides software to provision, manage, and operate large scale Linux HPC clusters and serves as a foundation for optional add-ons such as schedulers, like Sun's Sun Grid Engine, and other components not included with the solution.

The major new features of this release are:

- Support for SLES 10sp2 - a key feature in offering single point of contact support

- Inclusion of Sun supported cluster software, such as:
  - Sun Clustertools 8.1 (8.2 will be available in SHSLE 2.0.1, to be released shortly)
  - SunStudio 12u1
  - Sun Grid Engine 6.2u2 (SGE 6.2u3 will be available also in SHSLE 2.0.1)

- A management database ("gtdb") for storing cluster configuration information and automatic generation of config files, along with scriptable, command-line tools ("gtt") to manipulate this database

- Lustre 1.8.0.1 with pre-built Linux kernels with Lustre patches

- MPI libraries pre-built for Pathscale and SunStudio x86 compilers, in addition to previously supported libraries and compilers

- Simplified installation and setup - new scripts have been included to automate the routine portions of the head node installation

- Several package upgrades too numerous to mention here, as well as many minor defect fixes. See the Release Notes for the List of Contents and Resolved Issues.

- Certification to run on RHEL 5.3, SLES 10sp2, and CentOS 5.3.

2.0 has been tested on a wide variety of the latest Sun hardware - see the Release Notes for the Tested Platforms list. Full Story

Video: Programming for Multicore Processor Architectures

In part two of this video series on parallel programming, Ruud van der Pas discusses multi-core chip architectures and the problems they create for developing parallel applications.

Part 1: Performance Tuning

UniCloud 2.0 Bakes in Sun Grid Engine

Univa has announced UniCloud 2.0, a major new release which includes unique capabilities for enabling private, public and hybrid cloud environments:

“UniCloud 2.0 is a leap forward for organizations of any scale that seek the flexibility and mobility that cloud computing can provide,” says Fritz Ferstl, Director Sun Grid Engine, Sun Microsystems Inc. “This is a stellar product that fully leverages the outstanding Sun Grid Engine feature set. UniCloud with SGE takes cloud computing from an intriguing concept to an immediate reality in terms of the technology, applicability, and measurable value. We are pleased to have such a key role in this groundbreaking new product.” Full Story

Sun Business Ready HPC for MD Nastran

A new Sun Blueprints article provides necessary performance tuning recommendations and guidelines to allow an IT administrator or experienced MD Nastran user to configure both MD Nastran and the hardware platform for optimum performance (reduced elapsed times). Full Story

HPC and Virtualization: Not What You Might Expect

Josh Simons has an excellent writeup on HPC and Virtualization on his blog:

"HPC codes are generally compute intensive so one would expect such straight-line code to execute at full speed in a virtualized environment. These tests also confirm, however, that aspects of memory performance are essentially unaffected by virtualization as well. These results are a tribute primarily to the maturity of virtualization support included in current processor architectures. Full Story

Sun Studio Optimizations Make Opterons Scream

Darryl Gove has an interesting post on Sun Studio 12 Update 1 optimizations for AMD procesors:

"One particular trend has been that multicore processors have become mainstream. One way of illustrating that is to look at the number of threads per chip for all the submitted SPEC® CPU2006 integer speed results*. The following chart shows the cumulative number of submitted results since the benchmark came out in 2006 until the middle of June 2009 broken down by the number of threads that the chip could support. Full Story

Sun Updates Sun Studio Tools

Sun has announced the release of Sun Studio 12 Update 1 software, the latest version of its suite of compilers and tools for the Solaris 10 Operating System, Open Solaris and leading Linux platforms. Sun Studio is aimed at C, C++ and Fortran developers. The tool set consists of a number of tools for application developers, including parallelizing compilers, debuggers, advanced thread and performance analysis tools, and libraries that "help simplify the creation of high-performance applications and provide an optimized development environment for the latest multicore x86 and SPARC-based systems," said Dan Roberts, Sun's director of product management for data center software. Full Story