Cisco Blog > High Performance Computing Networking
October 4, 2010 at 5:58 pm PST
Just a digression from the normal technical talk here… We finally launched the new Cisco blogs site. Woo hoo!!
Most importantly, I wanted to let you all know that the landing page and RSS feed URLs have both changed. There are HTTP redirects in place for both (which I noticed this morning caused a bunch of old RSS entries to be marked as “new” — oops), but just in case you need to know them:
You don’t need to update your bookmarks / RSS readers, but you might want to anyway just because all the cool kids are doing it.
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Tags: blog, blogs, social media
September 29, 2010 at 12:00 pm PST
Have you ever wondered how an MPI implementation picks network paths and allocates resources? It’s a pretty complicated (set of) issue(s), actually.
An MPI implementation must tread the fine line between performance and resource consumption. If the implementation chooses poorly, it risks poor performance and/or the wrath of the user. If the implementation chooses well, users won’t notice at all — they silently enjoy good performance.
It’s a thankless job, but someone’s got to do it. 
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Tags: HPC, mpi, RDMA
September 16, 2010 at 12:00 pm PST
More exciting news on the Linux kernel front (thanks for the heads-up, Brice!): our friends at Big Blue have contributed a patch and started good conversation on the LKML mailing list about process-to-process copying. We still don’t have a good solution for being notified when registered memory is freed (my last post on this topic mentioned that the ummunotify patch had hit the -mm tree, but that eventually didn’t make it up to Linus’ tree), but hey — this is progress, too (albeit in a slightly different direction), so I’ll take it!
“Why do I care?” you say.
I’m glad you asked. Let me explain…
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September 13, 2010 at 12:00 pm PST
I was reminded recently how much of today’s MPI applications are written in Fortran. This is why we’re spending sooo much time on Fortran in the MPI-3 process (97 printed pages of Fortran material for the upcoming Stuttgart MPI Forum meeting — yowzers!).
Yes, Fortran.
(yes, I know this isn’t directly about high performance networking — but it is worth remembering that a huge number of people people use high performance networking via Fortran)
Before you laugh, remember that computer scientists/engineers don’t write the majority of the real-world codes that run on lots of today’s parallel computational resources. Real scientists and engineers do.
Er, I mean: rocket scientists, chemists, physicists — these are the types of people who have enormous computational problems that require HPC environments to solve. These are the people writing the codes that solve the “nature of the universe” kinds of problems. And they write in Fortran.
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August 27, 2010 at 12:00 pm PST
Doug Eadline wrote a cluster rant recently entitled “A Cluster in your Pocket“, talking about the possibility of “What if your cell phone could bring you real time results from a supercomputer?”
We’ve actually idly chatted about such things in the Open MPI community for a while. It would be tremendously fun to write an iPhone/Android app that could talk to an MPI implementation and/or application. Perhaps a good starting point would be to have the MPI implementation talk to an iPhone/Android phone.
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