SysMan Mall

Super Computing '06 - Tampa - Day 2

In brief this day was about how these clusters are being created &used and tools to make a developer's life easy. Today the HPC clusters are helping solve problems which were considered out of reach, weather simulations for tracking and predicting a hurricance's path, analyzing gene/ protein sequence, rendering extremely complicated polygon surfaces (did I hear a billion polygon's in a picture, an average high end graphics movie contain to the order of hundred thousand to million polygons), predicting bubble formation and its path in a tube, formation of clouds, high-end physics and others. Had heard earlier that how power hungry  such a computing infrastrcture can be, got more on what those numbers are on a real HPC cluster. Also the art of keeping things cool in such an environment, basically to chill these systems out is an interesting problem to solve in itself. Presentation on TSubame, (#7 on 27th Super Computer Top 500 List - http://www.top500.org/lists/2006/06) was simply "brilliant" and the punchline besides the demo of real highend apps that run on TSubame was a comment made to Prof Satoshi by students who used this system.  The comment was, "The system is like my PC, except that it is extremely fast", this is driven by a portal based approach for user accounts developed by Titech.  More on Tokyo Institute of Technology can be found here  http://www.gsic.titech.ac.jp/

Managing such clusters will be extreme fun. It makes all the more sense in what we are doing with System Manager application, that is, provisioning, updating (including firmware), fault management and monitoring to make life simple in running these "Beauty of Systems".  The focus really here is in managing a large scale environment with massive amount of storage capacity (upto a petabyte!!!).

There were some good presentations on code optimization, compilers and tools developed with HPC in mind.  Some of our partners also talked about their tools for an HPC environment, these will be presented at sc06 main event as well during this week (www.sc06.org). There were presentations on DTrace, the architecture of UltraSparc T1 processor and benchmarking.

We will wind up tomorrow the Sun HPC consortium portion and move to downtown Tampa for the main SC06 event. Am lookingforward towards Monday now....

...heard from our Senior exec yesterday that he wouldn't mind taking a chair and sitting in front of a StorageTek 8500 system and just admire how the whole thing works, with the robot arms whirring to pick up the right tape and put it in the right drive to retrieve data.  What makes this more wonderful is that our exec VP is an engineer at heart like most of us...

... and many people are talking about x4500..  someone said during dinner that in many years he has seen a real cool product which makes all other tradeshow items look like boring toys and I agree

 We'll manage them all....

Posted at 10:24PM Nov 12, 2006 by adikhit in General  |  Comments[0]