Saturday June 30, 2007

Bernd Dammann, Associate Professor at the Technical University of Denmark, spoke this week at Sun's HPC Consortium meeing in Dresden. The title of his talk was "Using Large SMP machines for research and education -- some experiences from the Technical University of Denmark."

As part of his introduction, Bernd mentioned that the University was founded in 1829 by H.C. Orsted. The school was relocated in the 1960s to the site of a former airport, which is evident if you look at the site layout.

The University is strong in a number of areas, notably wind turbine design and materials optimization--e.g. how much material can be cut away from a jet to reduce weight while still maintaining safety and structural integrity. Work has also been done on magnetic earth imaging via satellite and we were told that students at the University are very involved in corporate-sponsored eco-vehicle design contests. DTU is a Sun Center of Excellence in interval arithmetic and dynamic systems.

The HPC Center at DTU has a large amount of Sun "big iron"--large SMP machines-- around which the Center's computational capabilities are centered. They also have several other Sun hardware models in their machine room. Through a series of acquisitions, DTU now has onsite two Sun Fire E25Ks with 96 and 72 cores, three Sun Fire E6900s with 48 cores each, 10 V440s and a Sun Fire T2000 system.

All of their SPARC machines are kept at the same revision of Solaris (currently S10 11/06), which makes the complex easy to maintain and administer with two part-time system administrators.

In addition to their central compute infrastructure, DTU has the largest deployment of Sunray thin clients in Scandinavia with over 600 in use. Of these, they use about 24 as part of a "mobile classroom" that can be deployed on short notice in locations for temporary use. Students love the thin clients and appreciate the ability to access their desktop sessions from any Sunray on campus using their smartcards.

Bernd made several interesting points with respect to their Sun compute infrastructure. First, the variety of SPARC implementations and system architectures in their compute complex is used to advantage in their High Performance Computing course to expose students to a range of systems. They are also able to explore both OpenMP and MPI on their systems. In addition, because the use this single environment for both education and research, those students who move on to become researchers already have familiarity with the full range of scientific and productivity tools deployed on the HPC compute infrastructure.

He summarized the value proposition as follows. They don't have wasted desktop cycles tied up in thick clients. They have lower administration costs, they have consolidated their software licenses onto their central infrastructure. In addition, they can do centralized deployment of software, they can ensure that students do not tamper with configuratons while still allowing them the freedom to install their own software in $HOME and they do not have virus issues.

As a drawback, Bernd mentioned that their thin client environment was unfortunately not suitable for supporting heavy OpenGL 3D graphics for their users. After the talk, I introduced Bernd to Linda Fellingham, the engineering manager in charge of Sun's shared and scalable visualization products. As it turns out, Sun has a solution for DTU that will allow them to install an existing, but noisy, high-end graphics workstation in their central machine room and then route 3D graphics output directly to Sunrays in a seamless way. It's a pretty slick software solution (read more here. When I asked Bernd later if he found the Consortium meeting useful, he cited this interaction as an example of how meeting with Sun's engineering and other employees at such meetings is very useful for him.