We recorded an RCE podcast earlier today talking to Tiki L. Suarez-Brown, Ph.D, and Hai Ah Nam, Ph.D, the two co-chairs of the SC10 student cluster competition, and Doug Smith, the faculty sponsor of the Colorado cluster competition team from the past few years. Scheduling to get everyone together for the recording was a bit dicey; the recording will likely be available a little later than usual (Brock usually releases recordings on Saturdays — this one will likely be out early next week).

The competition is no cake walk: teams of students get a very specific power budget (26 amps) to run a whole schlew of real-world HPC applications within a limited time frame.  The teams are graded on several metrics, to include the highest Linpak number, most computational work processed in the time allotted, a question-and-answer interview, etc. 

Fun fact: 26 amps is about how much you need to run 3 coffee makers.

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I just ran across a great blog entry about SGE debuting topology-aware scheduling.  Dan Templeton does a great job of describing the need for processor topology-aware job scheduling within a server.  Many MPI jobs fit exactly within his description of applications that have “serious resource needs” — they typically require lots of CPU and/or network (or other I/O).  Hence, scheduling an MPI job intelligently across not only the network, but also across the network and resources inside the server, is pretty darn important.  It’s all about location, location, location!

Particularly as core counts in individual server are going up. 

Particularly as networks get more complicated inside individual servers. 

Particularly if heterogeneous computing inside a single server becomes popular.

Particularly as resources are now pretty much guaranteed to be non-uniform within an individual server.

These are exactly the reasons that, even though I’m a network middleware developer, I spend time with server-specific projects like hwloc — you really have to take a holistic approach in order to maximize performance.

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Tags: hwloc

We were recording an RCE-Cast with the PETSc guys when we realized that we had just about hit our 1 year anniversary; the first recording was posted on January 17, 2009.  Wow!  I had no idea that we had been doing this so long — Brock and I are both very pleasantly surprised that we’ve managed to keep it going this long.

If you’re unaware of RCE-Cast, it’s a podcast about “Research Computing and Engineering” that Brock Palen and I record every two weeks.  We talk to a variety of software and hardware projects, and/or any other topic that seems to be related to HPC- or RCE-like things. 

Here’s an experiment for our next interview with the Condor folks: “tweet @brockpalen questions for #condor http://tinyurl.com/hqzhm next guest on #RCE“.

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We had an astonishing 837 responses to the MPI User Survey.  Many thanks to all of you who filled out the survey!

The MPI Forum minions are busy analyzing the data — there’s a lot!  We’ll have more definitive results later, but for now, see below the jump for a few quickie facts from the results.

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Sorry for the lack of activity here this month, folks.  As usual, December is the month to recover from SC and catch up on everything else you were supposed to be doing.  So I’ll try to make up for it with a small-but-tasty Christmas morsel.  Then I’ll disappear for a long winter’s nap; you likely won’t see me until January (shh! don’t tell my wife that I’m working today!).

The topic of my musing today is one that has come up multiple times in conversation over the past two weeks.  Although I’m certainly not the only guy to talk about this on the interwebs, today’s topic is server-side hardware offload of network communications.

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