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

Scientists Use Ranger to Explore Sub-Atomic Physics

HPC Wire brings us this story by TACC's Aaron Dubrow:

"Physics has led us deeper and deeper into the heart of matter in a quest to determine what the universe is made of. It's a real-world question that drives particle physicist Robert Sugar to dig in his heels and break out the big guns -- supercomputers like Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center -- to help solve the numerical equations at the root of fundamental physics." Full Story

Video: Project Fortress at Sun Labs

In this video, Eric Allen and Guy Steele present on Project Fortress.

Video: Transactional Memory on Rock

In this video from the recent Sun Labs Open House, Mark Moir discusses Rock's transactional memory and how to exploit It.

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

Registration open: Sun HPC Consortium, Dresden June

Sun customers and partners are invited to attend the semi-annual HPC Consortium event June 15-17 in Dresden, Germany. Early Bird Registration is $249 USD if you register before 15 May, 2008. Registration site.

The Sun Global Education and Research High Performance Computing Consortium (SHPCC) is an independent, volunteer-organized, international group of member organizations that own or use Sun computer systems with emphasis on high-performance, technical computing, and visualization.

SHPCC's mission is to provide the high performance computing community with leadership and provide a forum for information exchange to enable the development and effective use of Sun computational tools in achieving the business and research objectives of member organization

Participants represent a broad range of computing applications and environments. The meeting format is designed to give participants the opportunity to present HPC developments, discuss applications and needs with their peers, and to hear and provide feedback on Sun's engineering plans. <

Previous agendas and presentations are on line.

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 intrests from application developers to CIOs and VPs of Research. Registration site.

Sun Rolls Out Storage & Archive Solution for HPC

The new Sun Storage and Archive Solution for HPC enables you to manage the balance between high-performance access to your data when needed and cost effective, lower-performance storage for large amounts of data over the long term. Built with an architecture that supports multiple storage tiers, the solution provides high-performance storage for current use, bulk disk storage for low-performance needs, and long-term storage on power-efficient tape for data requiring only occasional access. Data movement or migration is managed through anautomated policy engine to help ensure that the right data is in the right place at the right time.

What makes this offering unique is that it's a complete storage solution for HPC requirements:

"That's really its strength," said Chris Wood, CTO of Sun Data Storage. "It's not a just a NAS filer, it's not a tape drive, it's not a box--it's a complete solution that addresses the very specific data types you run into in an HPC environment. And not to forget, Sun recently has brought into its family the Lustre file system, a very, very high performance scratch file system for HPC. We of course are seamlessly integrated with Lustre, so you can use them both. And what you get out of that is the multiple-petabyte scratch capability of Lustre, with the complete, system-managed, multi-tiered archive of the SAM-QFS side of the house, with the seamless ability to move the data between the two at extraordinarily high bandwidth." 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

Radio HPC #2: AMD Fires Up and New Sun Storage and Archive Solution

In the latest episode of Radio HPC, Tony Warner and his guests bring us the latest HPC news from Sun Microsystems. In a special Partner segment, Tony interviews David Rich, Director of HPC at AMD. Plus, Sun's Chris Wood to gives us the scoop on the company's all-new Storage and Archive Solution for HPC.

Related Links:

Sun HPC Community Portal - Events and Community News

Events

Lustre User Group, Sonoma, CA, April 28-30, 2008
Open Source Grid & Cluster Conference, Oakland, CA, May 12-16, 2008
Sun HPC Consortium, Dresden, Germany, June 15-17

News Stories

Sun Systems with AMD processors
Tsubame Supercomputer at Tokyo Institute of Technology
TACC Ranger Supercomputer at Texas Advanced Computing Center
Sun HPC Data and Archiving Solutions

You can download the MP3 file, or subscribe to future shows.

Allinea offers pathway to parallel

In this HPC Wire story, Allinea contends that, as the industry shifts to multicore architectures, "programming" and "parallel programming" must become synonymous. The company is working hard to advance the state of the art in debugging at scale as it collaborates with with TACC to investigate best practices for managing complexity on Ranger-scale problems:

"The processors we are seeing now, and will continue to see in at least the medium-term, will offer performance improvements only to those applications that can take advantage of many cores at one time. Since software customers generally expect applications to do more in less time, software developers have a strong incentive to parallelize their codes. But developers generally don't have the skills they need to make this change." 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

Blood flow on the Teragrid

The Grid Gurus point us to their favorite application of Grid technology: the work of George Karniadakis, Suchuan Dong, Nick Karonis, and their colleagues on modeling blood flow in the human body.

"In other words, they mapped different parts of the human body (chest, legs, arms, head, and their arterial branches) to different TeraGrid sites, linking them by a simple, non-communication intensive 1-D problem." Full Story

New Studies on HPC Adoption

The Council on Competitiveness and IDC have released two new studies that identify the barriers large and small firms face in moving from desktop computers to High Performance Computing (HPC) servers.

The first of the two new studies, Reveal: Council on Competitiveness and USC-ISI Broad Study of Desktop Technical Computing End Users and HPC, found among other things that companies face three major barriers to HPC adoption: uncertainty about the availability of software that will run their applications on HPC servers, lack of people skilled in using HPC hardware and software systems, and cost constraints associated with moving to HPC.

The second new study, Reflect: Council on Competitiveness and USC-ISI In-Depth Study of Technical Computing End Users and HPC, focuses on a predefined group of desktop and entry-level HPC users in a specific domain to identify any significant differences from the broader Reveal study. Full Story

TACC to Host Summer Supercomputing Institute

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin today announced that it will host its second annual five-day Summer Supercomputing Institute in Austin from July 28 through Aug. 1. The institute will provide researchers with an intensive introduction to TACC’s computing resources. Senior TACC staff will deliver presentations and lead interactive labs focused on using TACC’s resources and technologies, including:

* High performance computing systems
* Visualization systems and advanced display environments
* Massive storage systems
* Grid computing technologies

In addition, leading computational scientists will discuss their work, including examples of how they apply TACC’s resources in their research. Full Story

Record Benchmarks: AMD quad-cores really shipping

With news of record benchmarks, AMD has begun shipping quad core Opteron processors for standard servers. While this should help them compete in the chip wars, they are going to have to do more to keep up:

"AMD is therefore feverishly working on the launch of its own 45 nm technology, and the first 45 nm processors are expected to be released in the second half of 2008 and include larger caches, among other things." Full Story

Knocking on the Petaflops Door

HPC Wire reports that suspense is in the air for the pending TOP500 list to be announced at ISC'08 in June:

"While a number of research organizations around the world have announced plans to reach the petaflop/s performance level, whether any will achieve this milestone in time for the next TOP500 list remains to be seen. Following tradition, the 31st edition of the TOP500 list will be unveiled during the opening session of ISC '08 on Wednesday, June 18." Full Story

In my mind, Sun has really opened the door for the Petaflops Era with the TACC Ranger supercomputer. The Sun Constellation System is the world's first open Petascale computing environment combining ultra-dense high performance computing, networking, storage and software into an integrated system that delivers massive scalability, dramatically reduced complexity and breakthrough economics. Check out the Pathways to Petascale whitepaper.

Video: Second Life Panel on 3rd Generation CMT

At a special event in Second Life, Sun announced the Sun SPARC® Enterprise T5140 and T5240 1U and 2U servers based on the 3rd generation UltraSPARC® T2 Plus processor, the industry's first 3rd generation dual socket systems. In this video, Sun CTO Rick Heatherington and members of the engineering team describe the ground-breaking technologies inside the system. Google Video

Video: Sun Labs Open House

This week Sun Microsystems opened the doors of Sun Labs for its annual open house. Founded in 1991, Sun Microsystems Laboratories is an applied research facility and an integral part of Sun's overall research and development program. Many of Sun Labs innovative technologies are available as open-source software and hardware, welcoming communities of research partners to participate in the development of next-generation technologies. The Sun Labs site features HPC-related efforts like Project Fortress as well as source code, so check it out. Full Story

Intel Selling Optical IB Cable Division

Intel Corporation and EMCORE Corporation have signed a definitive agreement to sell its Intel Connects Cables business to EMCORE Corporation. Intel Connects Cables are drop in optical replacements for copper cabling in High Performance Computing Clusters. EMCORE intends to build the current 20Gbps (DDR) Intel Connects Cables products through 2008 and plans to continue development of future high performance interconnects, including 40Gbps (QDR) products. Full Story

At SC07, Intel Connects cables were used by Sun for the large-scale distributed visualization demo described below.

Video: Evaluating UltraSPARC T2 Throughput Using the PEAS suite

With the launch of new dual-socket UltraSPARC T2 plus systems yesterday, you might be curious about the HPC throughput performance of the Niagara architecture. Presented by Ruud Van der Pas, Sun Microsystems, this presentation video discusses preliminary throughput results on the UltraSPARC T2 Processor. This presentation was part of the Sun HPC Consortium held Nov 10, 2007 in Reno, Nevada. PDF slides

The next Sun HPC Consortium will be held June 15-17 in Dresden, Germany. Early-bird Registration is now open.