Wednesday November 30, 2005

Today marks the official end of the Atlantic hurricane season. Mother Nature has fired her parting shot with the emergence of tropical storm Epsilon today. Thanks, Mom.

This chart from the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which includes a preliminary (and outdated) 2005 summary, says it all. Red marks hurricanes, blue marks named storms. The hurricane count should be 7 and the named storm count was, I believe, 26.

Check this page for a nicely done and detailed retrospective on the entire hurricane season.

And if you are thinking of buying some beachfront property, you may find the following NCDC graphic interesting. It shows all of the hurricane landfalls in the continental US from 1950-2004.

Monday November 28, 2005

I work in Sun's SPARC Platform Software Group. We have a wide set of responsibilities, including the development of platform-specific firmware, service processor software, fault management and system management components, to name several. And if you've been poking around on OpenSolaris.org and wondered about the hypervisor, yeah, we do that, too. We are also very involved in the bring-up of new SPARC chips. Like Niagara. And you may have heard of ROCK. Very cool and innovative technologies.

We are hiring and looking for some really strong, motivated technical people who really want to kick some butt and have fun doing it. Follow the links below for full details on some of our positions and drop me a note at joshua.simons (at) sun.com if you are qualified and interested.

Firmware/bringup:

Member of Technical staff, Burlington MA or Bay Area CA
Member of Technical Staff, California

Solaris kernel development:

Member of Technical Staff, California or Texas
Member of Technical Staff, California or Texas

Thursday November 24, 2005

We live in the woods south of Boston. When the sun is just so, birds see a reflection of the woods in our windows and fly straight into the glass. Usually breaking their necks.

We've hung ribbons on the outside of our windows and they help, but we recently discovered WindowAlert static-cling decals and they work at least as well and look much better.

Wednesday November 23, 2005

It's time to see just how well connected the blogosphere is. If you are a well-connected blogger, I need your help.

Since December of 1991, I have been looking unsuccessfully for an English word whose definition is "any statue of a chicken." I was set on this quest by my friend David Gingold, with whom I was working at Thinking Machines Corporation in Cambridge, MA. The hunt has cooled considerably over the years, but I'm still quite vexed.

It's all Andre Previn's fault, actually. In 1991, he published his book No Minor Chords -- My Days in Hollywood. The book was reviewed by Peter Schickele in the New York Times Review of Books on December 1st, 1991. The concluding section of Mr. Schickele's review is reproduced here:

"No Minor Chords" does have one near-fatal flaw. Describing a game of Dictionary...at Mike Nichol's house, Mr. Previn recalls: "Mike blew an entire round one night by being totally unable to read with a straight face that the meaning of the given word was 'any statue of a chicken.' He was weeping with laughter, and the fact that this definition turned out to be the true one did not help." It's a good story but what was the word? Good god, I mean, some of us have to know. Perhaps Mr Previn's sin of omission can be corrected in a future edition of this otherwise molto entertaining book.

Well, David and I are two of those people who have to know. I've tried reverse dictionaries, art books, online searches, electronic dictionary searches, and writing to both MM. Previn and Schickele. To no avail.

Please help me get this monkey off my back.

Saturday November 19, 2005

Concrete, WA

Name aside, perhaps not a hard place to live at all. You can visit the town web site for some photos and history. And ponder the reasoning behind the town's series of names since 1871: Minnehaha, Baker, Cement City, and, as of 1909, Concrete.

While I was fueling up at the local gas station, another car pulled in for gas. Amazingly, the car was absolutely out of fuel---the driver could not get the car restarted once he'd stopped. He was trying to start the car because he'd pulled in with the pump on the wrong side, away from his fuel cap. Bummer.

Maybe Concrete is a hard place after all.

Wednesday November 16, 2005

I end my coverage with a few photos from the conference, the week-end HPC Consortium meeting, and from the social events held before and during the conference.

One final comment about the stay in Seattle. I was hugely impressed by both our customers' dedication to spending their entire weekends with Sun at our HPC Consortium meeting and by the energy and commitment of all of the Sun attendees. By the time Monday came and the conference started, many of us were already exhausted by the pace.

Dieter an Mey from RWTH Aachen presenting code optimization results

Sun code optimization guru, Ruud van de Paas

An international Sun crew: Jonas Edberg (Sweden), Len Wisniewski (US), and Harvey Richardson (Scotland)

Sun employees Hanxi Chen and Rich Brueckner (Mr. Sun Booth Guy, among other roles!)

Gotta have some Geek. HPCS Photonics demo in the booth--cool stuff!

Terry Dontje, Senior Staff Engineer on Sun's ClusterTools project (MPI)

Downtown Seattle from the Space Needle, location of the joint Sun-CISCO-Engenio party

Sun got some excellent press coverage of our Supercomputing '05 presence in the Nov 16th, Seattle Times. A nice photo on the front page of the business section and some ink in the accompanying article about the conference. Our own Rich Bruekner is quoted.

The photo is below. The article is here.

Tuesday November 15, 2005

I just sat through the first half of Bill Gates' opening keynote speech here in Seattle at Supercomputing '05. Here is my summary of the insightful things Mr. Gates shared with us on his topic, The Future of Computing in the Sciences.

Sunday November 13, 2005

Hagan Rivers, of Two Rivers Consulting, gave a talk on Ajax and Web 2.0 at last week's meeting of Boston CHI (the Boston-area chapter of the ACM SIG on Computer-Human Interaction.)

She is an excellent speaker and I found the Ajax section particularly exciting and the Web 2.0 piece less so. Probably because I feel Ajax is the early embodiment of something important, while Web 2.0 is a squishier concept--more an attitude than anything else.

So, what did learn? First, Ajax is what is enabling some of the new style of web interfaces that have started popping up. Panning by clicking and dragging in Google Maps, for example. Netflix is starting to incorporate Ajax into its interface. Web interfaces are starting to act more like desktop interfaces.

Second, I learned that Ajax really isn't new technology: it's a new name applied to an aggregation of several technologies. At its most basic, it is Asynchronous Javascript and XML. See the slide deck (below) for a more precise list of the technologies involved. What Ajax enables is asynchonous communication between the client and server sides of a web application. Old, page-oriented style of interface: User mucks locally with forms, etc., and then presses Submit which then might cause the server to generate new html for the client. New, Ajax-oriented style of interface: The client-side Ajax engine and the server have the ability to cooperatively and constantly update the application's web interface without explicit actions from the user. It's much closer to the kind of interface interactions that have been available for a long time in the desktop world.

So why is it exciting? If Ajax merely helps web apps move closer to what's already available for apps on the desktop, what is the big deal? The big deal is that you can now see an inkling of a future in which desktop operating systems and applications don't matter anymore. The browser really begins to be capable of becoming the future desktop replacement. And, while Ajax might not be exactly the right solution in the end, you can see the shape of where we are headed.

A desktop born of open standards and based on open standards. Applications that live in the network--applications and data that are accessible from everywhere. Looking out a few years, I see a broad and promising vista (with a small 'v') where a good, solid, standards-compliant browser is all you'll need to access your applications.

Hagan's slides and supporting video clips are here.

This is the final set of customer talks from the Sun HPC Consortium meeting in Seattle. About 150 Sun customers and numerous Sun employees have spent long days this weekend sharing information about customer experiences and needs on the one hand and information about Sun products and product futures on the other. All of this in advance the Supercomputing '05 conference proper, which kicks off officially tomorrow.

Phil Williams, University of Nottingham, UK

Dr. Phil Williams, an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham gave a talk titled Science and Performance at Nottingham. His talk was paired with a presentation by Michael Rudgyard of Streamline Computing. I've combined by notes from these talks here.

Phil presented some background information on Nottingham, including the fact that they have campuses in Malaysia and China, in addition to their multiple locations in the UK.

In their recent, large cluster procurement, Nottingham was looking for a partner who could deliver the most equipment for their budget. In addition to delivering a large cluster, the partner needed also to be able to deliver smaller, scaled down "clones" of this system for use at multiple locations within the University.

Phil mentioned how surprised they were when some of the vendors responded to the procurement proposal by showing up at their required technology demonstration sessions with sales people who were completely unable to answer technical questions from Nottingham personnel. [Amazing that anyone serious about being in HPC would not know that these customers are technically very savvy and should be engaged by people who can speak to them about their issues at a technical level.]

Seven vendors responded to their procurement request and six were invited to bid. The seventh, whose initial proposal exceeded the stated Nottingham budget by a factor of 2.5X, was not invited to the next level. Three vendors were selected to submit best and final offers and Sun was selected in September.

The Jupiter system, which was delivered in conjunction with Streamline Computing, consists of 1024 dual-processor v20z (Opteron) systems interconnected with Gigabit ethernet. The full system, which comprised 19 full racks, was built in Sun's Linlithgow facility as were the 16 smaller, clone systems.

This system is now #109 on TOP500 list at 3.14 TFLOP with a 72% efficiency rating on LINPACK. It is currently Sun's #1 system on the list and is the most efficient TOP500 gigabit installation in the TOP500.

Greg S. Johnson, Texas Advanced Computing Center, USA

Our final customer speaker of the event was Greg Johnson from the Texas Advanced Computing Center which is part of the University of Texas at Austin. His talk was titled Visualization at TACC.

TACC's mission and passion is distributed visualization. In addition, they are distributed visualization partners in the Teragrid, which provides scalable high-end visualization resources to users across the US.

Greg outlined the goals of distributed visualization. The first is providing access to high performance visualization of a power that is well beyond that available at a typical researcher's desktop. Second is location transparency of resources. And third is an improved end-user experience.

The challenges of distributed visualization were as follows. First, latency over the wide area network. Second, delivering quality of service at the user interface. And, third, WAN bandwidth (1280 pixels by 1024 pixels by 12 bytes/pixel by 24 frames/sec is about 360 MB/s uncompressed--can do much better with compression technology.) distrib viz challenges: latency (WAN and GPU readback)

Greg then described the overall architecture of the Sun Terascale Visualization System, which is the cornerstone of TACC's distributed visualization strategy. It was developed in a collaborative effort between TACC and Sun.

The major components of the system are a Sun Fire 25K SMP with 64 UltraSPARC IV processors and 500 GB of memory. In addition, a large number of NVIDIA Quadro FX3000G cards, Myrinet, and 3DLabs U22 cards are used as well in associated systems.

The main takeaways from Greg were that modern networks permit the wide area routing of geometry and pixels at interactive rates and that the access models for visualization resources in the mainstream are shifting in the direction of those of HPC.

I attended the Developer Tools breakout session of Sun's HPC Consortium meeting this morning in Seattle. It's amazing to see the turnout here and in other sessions at 8am on rainy, foggy Sunday morning. In addition to a set of Sun presentations, we had several customer presentations, which I've summarized below.

Dieter an Mey, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Dieter an Mey, who is well-known to many of us involved in HPC at Sun, gave a presentation titled HPC Program Development. Dieter works at RWTH Aachen University where he is heavily involved in the universitied HPC efforts. He's also very involved in the industry-wide OpenMP effort.

Dieter presented results of several parallel application development and tuning efforts. His slides were graphical and dense, so I will attempt only a short summary here.

The Center now supports four platforms: SPARC Solaris, Opteron Solaris, Opteron Linux, and Opteron Windows. Doing this requires more tools and more compilers. And more work for Aachen staff. But more opportunity to attract a wider variety of users.

Dieter presented some results of a porting effort moving an application from Windows/Intel to Windows Opteron. He was able to achieve a 6.2x improvement overall, which was quite good. However, he could not resist also trying a port to Solaris/Opteron, which he did using a variety of Sun's tools, including his favorite performance analysis tool, Sun Analyzer. All in, all done, he achieved a speedup of 14x on Solaris Opteron. Nice.

Allen Malony, University of Oregon, USA

Professor Allen Malony gave a talk entitled TAU at Work about the TAU Parallel Performance System which has been developed over the past 14+ years. I highly recommend visiting the TAU site via the previous link as I can't possibly due this system justice here.

TAU is essentially a performance analysis framework for high performance computing. It is portable and open source. It supports multiple languages (C, F77, F90, C++, Java, etc.), multiple programming paradigms (multi-threading, message passing, hybrid models, etc.)

It supports performance instrumentation, measurement, and analysis--including scalable visualization in support of performance analysis. Instrumentation can be done at the source level (either manually or automatically), at the object level (via pre-instrumented libraries), or at the executable level via dynamic instrumentation.

TAU has been available previously on Solaris/SPARC and now will soon be available on Solaris 10 for Opteron. Cool.

Oscar Hernandez, University of Houston, USA

Oscar Hernandez, a graduate student at the University of Houston, spoke about the OpenUH project, which is creating an open source, portable OpenMP compiler suite that supports research into OpenMP language features, teaching, and exploration of tools for use with OpenMP.

Open64-UH is based on the Open64 compiler that was released to open source by SGI. It supports C, C++, Fortran77 and Fortran90.

Awhile back, I blogged about my experiences putting Solaris 10 on my laptop. I'm reporting in again, because I recently installed Nevada (which might eventually be called Solaris 11) along with a couple of extremely useful scripts that will greatly improve your Solaris laptop experience. The cool thing is that these scripts (and Nevada itself) are available on the Open Solaris website, so it's okay for me to blog about them.

The two scripts are inetmenu and frkit. While both are useful, inetmenu is the true godsend in that it automates the act of attaching to a network and makes it very easy to deal with the variety of networking environments a mobile user encounters: it can automatically configure using a static IP, DHCP with NIS, and DHCP without NIS. And it knows about wireless as well (if configured).

Check out the Laptop Community on the OpenSolaris site for more information on mobile Solaris. You'll find frkit, inetmenu, wireless, and other information there. Go wild and have fun!

By the way, I'm blogging this on my Nevada-enabled Tecra M2 laptop at Sun's HPC Consortium meeting in Seattle, connected via local wireless and VPN'ed into Sun. Smooth as silk.

Saturday November 12, 2005

My second and final installment from Day I of Sun HPC Consortium meeting in Seattle. We had two customer presentations, which I summarize below.

L. Eric Greenwade, Idaho National Laboratory (INL), USA

Eric Greenwade is the HPC Architect at the Idaho National Laboratory and at the newly formed Center for Modeling and Simulation (CAMS). His talk was titled Ozone: Sun v20z Cluster Retrospective.

INL is charged by the US Department of Energy (DOE) to lead the revitalization of nuclear energy in the US. It was quite interesting to hear some of the nuclear engineering applications with which INL is involved. They are working with NASA on space transportation architectures (both robotic and crewed vehicles) and are also working on homeland security applications: photonuclear detection of nuclear materials, including cargo container detection of SNM (special nuclear materials). As Eric says, you actually don't WANT to detect SNMs in cargo containers. :-)

With respect to HPC computing infrastructure, Eric described a heterogeneous site with a majority of Sun equipment (other systems include some old Cray vector machines and some generic Linux clusters.) INL use Sun Enterprise servers and storage to form the backbone and have a 494 processor v20z (called Ozone) with a dual GigE network dedicated to message-passing traffic.

According to Eric, their v20z cluster has allowed INL to leapfrog their original goals by two years. TThey've achieved 20-80x performance increases with the system and it is the centerpiece of the INL HPC environment. The system is the first step in INL's 10-year strategic HPC plan which takes them to over 1 PetaFLOP within the decade.

David De Roure, University of Southampton, UK

Our second customer speaker in the afternoon was David De Roure, who is the head of Grid and Pervasive Computing at the University of Southampton. His talk was titled "WUN Grid -- The Worldwide University Network Grid.

The Worldwide University Network is an international alliance of 16 research-led institutions in the UK, US, and Scandinavia. The WUN came first, followed by the WUN Grid, which is a deployment of grid technology across these institutions to form a virtual organization. One of David's main points was that the pre-existing relationships and trust that existed betweenWUN member organizations was a key factor in the success of establishing a shared grid infrastructure between the members. With these relationships they were able to easily overcome the typical organizational barriers that often hobble international grid efforts.

Interestingly, the WUN Grid decided to focus their initial efforts in a non-traditional area for grid computing. Their priorities are arts and humanities and social sciences. These areas were chosen in part because it was felt that even modest efforts in these areas could yield large results. In terms of infrastructure priorities, these were similarly non-traditional: First data grids, then collaborative grids, and then finally computational grids.

David mentioned several efforts, one of which I'll sketch here. They've established an arts and humanities effort that has come to be known unofficially as the Culture Grid. It is linked to HASTAC in the US, which is a strategic alliance of scientists, humanists, artists, social theorists, legal specialists and information technology specialists. In the UK, it is linked with the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Humanties Data Service. In addition, they have linked to the Global Grid Forum's Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Research Group.

The Sun HPC Consortium meeting kicked off promptly at 8am in the Bell Harbor Conference Center on the Seattle waterfront. Three Sun customers spoke in the morning session.

Jim Pepin, University of Southern California, USA

First up was Jim Pepin, from the University of Southern California. Jim is the USC Information Services CTO and Director of their HPC Center. His talk was titled Building and Benchmarking a 10TF Linux Cluster.

The USC cluster comprises a mixture of over 1800 Sun, Dell, and IBM nodes with a Mryinet interconnect fabric. In addition to their cluster, the center also has a Sun Fire 15K with 72 processors and 288GB memory, which is used for jobs requiring very large amounts of shared memory.

Jim identified several unique challenges in building large clusters. Power and airflow are primary issues. Power draw during benchmark runs is about 2X over idle. Jim focused on the amount of power consumed under load, but to me the real issue was that the multiplier was only a factor of two--idle power consumption in the datacenter is huge. With respect to cooling, he mentioned they can see the effects of non-uniform cooling during their benchmark runs as some processors near the tops of their racks automatically declock (and slow down) as they overheat.

Jim also mentioned wiring as a huge issue at this scale. They recently upgraded their Myrinet infrastructure and spent about 12 hours running new cables. Primary issues include density, testing, and power cabling. In addition, this large mass of cabling can also interfere with effective cooling.

Graham Mowbray, ACEnet, Canada

Our second customer speaker was Graham Mowbray, the Executive Director of ACEnet. His talk was titled Transforming Research in Atlantic Canada.

ACEnet (Atlantic Computational Excellence Network) is a program designed to support distributed collaboration amongst 20+ universities and institutions across Canada's four Atlantic provinces: Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick.

Because the Atlantic provinces have a sparse and very distributed population, distributed technology collaboration is seen as an important need to reach critical mass for research effectiveness in the region.

ACEnet has decided to partner with Sun to deliver the value of distributed technologies to Altantic Canada. As Graham described it, they were looking for a partner with several important characteristics:

First, they realized that they did not have the human resources to 'self-build' their solution--they needed a partner to help. Second, they realized that they didn't need to buy the future right now, but they did need to find a partner whose vision is consistent with ACEnet's so that elements would be available in the future when they need them. They also wanted a vendor who would be around for a long time and also that they preferred a single vendor as a way to reduce complexity.

And, at the end of the day, having the appropriate hardware was just "table stakes" to be considered as a partner. What carried more weight was having a strong grid vision and a real commitment to a substantial partnership over the long term.

Sean Smith, University of Queensland, Australia

Our third speaker was Sean Smith, Director of the Centre for Computational Molecular Science (CMMS) from the University of Queensland. His talk was titled Computational Molecular Science in Nanotechnology and Biotechnology: Implemented on Sun's Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron Grid Platforms.

CCMS hosts Australia's first Sun Center of Excellence, the Sun Center of Excellence for Simulation of Bio- and Nano-Systems. CMMS is also the site of Australia's second largest cluster resource.

CMMS runs a set of clusters using a mix of Sun Fire v60x and v20z two-processor servers connected with Gigabit ethernet. These systems are used to run a mix of single-process and parallel jobs using a mixture of ISV and homegrown applications.

CMMS also uses an older Sun Fire V880 with 8 processors and 32 GB of memory. As Prof. Smith said, "it's an older system, but still useful for quantum chemistry codes that just won't fit in a cluster node."

This Sun customer is running mostly Fedora Core 3 along with other Fedora revs and Solaris 9 on their large shared-memory machines. They use Intel and Portland Group compilers and generally see a 25% or so performance advantage on Opteron over Xeon for their applications. CMMS uses the Linux version of Sun's Grid Engine software.

Dr. Smith ended with an overview of the particular scientific questions being explored at the Center. I can't do justice to that and so would recommend instead a visit to the Center's website for more details.

Friday November 11, 2005

I just arrived in Seattle for Supercomputing '05, the big annual conference for High Performance Computing in the US. This year about 7000 attendees are expected. There will also be hundreds of industry and research exhibits on the show floor. This year, as a result of Sun's acquisition of Storage Tek, Sun will have two booths.

Sun runs a couple of very important events at the conference every year, just before the conference officially opens. First and foremost is Sun's HPC Consortium meeting, which brings together Sun HPC customers and Sun technologists for two days of meetings and presentations. It's a great place for our customers to hear in detail what we are doing in HPC and for us to hear directly from our customers about both their successes and their challenges. As part of this event, I'll be presenting a brief update on Sun's ClusterTools product, which includes the Sun MPI library--used by application writers to create scalable parallel applications for use on clusters and SMP systems.

This weekend also brings Sun's HPC ACES--our HPC field experts--together for training and for discussions with customers and partners and with Sun product engineering and executive management. Our ACES are the tip of Sun's HPC spear and they are an impressive group indeed.

This year we'll also be running an internal Sun HPC strategic planning session here in Seattle. With the throw weight of Sun HPC expertise assembling here in Seattle, it's the perfect venue.

We will also be making some announcements over the course of the show. So stay tuned.