SysMan Mall

Super Computing '06 - Day 4 (yesterday)

From a distance Cluster Management appears to be a different problem, looking closely into it one can see similarities with management of an enterprise datacenter management, except that the ingredients used will be mostly homegenous type of system and operating system in case of an HPC cluster. Though heterogenity is considered good, it doesn't appear to be a requirement at present. The building blocks today are commodity hardware components, I think the problem of heterogenity will hit HPC clusters when clusters grow over a period of time and the choice of hardware, software may be best met by some other commodity component in the market to run either the same app or a more powerful app. on the same cluster. This will obviously force existing solutions like rocks, ganglia to be ported to those newer environment. Again extensibility and integrability appear to be an afterthought with almost all present solutions out there including the best ones. I am happy for the fact that our focus at Sun is in the right direction at the word go. Yesterday was mostly spent looking around at what others are doing and is it possible for example to integrate two grids atleast from management point of view...
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Posted at 04:40PM Nov 15, 2006 by adikhit in General  |  Comments[0]

Super Computing '06 - Tampe Florida - day 3

The highlight of the day was a talk by Andy, on "Road to petascale computing". He covered the topic in a very simplistic way, as to how such systems can be built and the challenges that lie ahead of us during and after building such such a system, areas where improvements will help and other areas where improvements will not help as much. Later in the day we moved to Tampa Convention Center in downtown Tamp to participate in SC'06 main event. Microsoft is right at the gate :-) unfortunately there aren't many impressive things on the stall. Inside the hall the heat is really on, and literally in one corner where switches from many vendors are staged and connected, standing behind them makes one warm and comfy in a matter of moments.[Read More]

Posted at 09:41PM Nov 13, 2006 by adikhit in General  |  Comments[0]

Super Computing '06 - Tampa - Day 2

After hearing so many cool things on  day one at HPC, I felt that we have covered it all and Sunday will be a repeat of all the same story.  Turns out that was not the case, day-2 was equally interesting and was full with equal amount of energy & intensity in the participants and covering a lot of new ground. IMHO highlight of the day was presentation from the TiTech team extremely powerful content! What we do at Sun is being used in an extremely useful way.
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Posted at 10:24PM Nov 12, 2006 by adikhit in General  |  Comments[0]

SuperComputing '06 - Tampa Florida

My initial thinking about HPC (High Performance Computing) was a little different, all geek stuff !  It still is. Have been interacting indirectly through some of our cool customer facing engineers in the last few quarters where we were working on setting up System Manager in some of the bigger envionments, the fact had however not sunk in till as recent as a few weeks back. The realization was a satisfying one ! The math of large number has always fascinated me,  scale teaches you one thing among many others, which is, "designing for scalability can not be an afterthought". The need for scalability has to be there right from inception and, this is what Sun is about.  Starting from Operating System Solaris all the way down to the processor SPARC (and everything in between) you can see scalability.  Not content with what's there, engineers at Sun have pushed the envelope in all direction from scaling Processors (CMT) to connecting multiple systems (GRID) and again everything in between.  Listening to some of our senior executives and correlating the work we are doing at System Manager and its relevance in HPC space has been enlightneing on a Saturday (Yes its a weekend but I'm enjoying listening to all the good stuff). I am already looking forward towards the session on Sunday and beyond...
 

Posted at 08:33PM Nov 11, 2006 by adikhit in General  |  Comments[0]