A few people asked me to post the slides that I just presented in the Cisco vendor session at EuroMPI’13. In short, I gave a brief overview of our servers and switches, and then some technical details of how we use SR-IOV in our usNIC, etc. Here’s the slides:
I’m excited to announce that Cisco has just released usNIC as a feature of the UCS C-Series Rack Servers product line. usNIC is available since the release 1.5(2) of the Cisco UCS C-Series Integrated Management Controller.
One feature of the usNIC ultra-low latency Ethernet solution for the UCS Cisco VIC that we think is interesting is the fact that it is based on SR-IOV. What is SR-IOV, and why is it relevant in the HPC world? SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) is commonly used in the server virtualization world. The most […]
I often get questions from those who are just starting with MPI; they want to know common things such as: How to install / setup an MPI implementation How to compile their MPI applications How to run their MPI applications How to learn more about MPI This will be the first blog entry of several […]
I’ve previously written a bunch about the effects of location, Location, LOCATION! on MPI applications. Here’s another subtle NUMA effect that a well-tuned MPI implementation can hide from you: intelligently distributing traffic between multiple network interfaces. Yeah, yeah, most MPI implementations have had so-called “multi-rail” support for a long time (i.e., using multiple network interfaces […]
If you’re a bargain basement HPC user, you might well scoff at the idea of having more than one network interface for your MPI traffic. “I’ve got (insert your favorite high bandwidth network name here)! That’s plenty to serve all my cores! Why would I need more than that?” I can think of (at least) […]
I have previously written a few details about our upcoming ultra low latency solution for High Performance Computing (HPC). Since my last blog post, a few of you sent me emails asking for more technical details about it. So let’s just put it all out there.
Open MPI recently revamped its entire run-time parameter system (a.k.a., “MCA parameter system”) as part of its implementation effort for the “MPI_T” interface from MPI-3. The MPI_T interface is a standardized interface designed for MPI tools, but can be used by regular MPI application programs, too. Specifically, MPI_T provides programatic access to two types of […]
I’ve previously posted on “Why MPI is Good for You” (blog tag: why-mpi-is-good-for-you). The short version is that it hides the typical application programmer from lots and lots of underlying network stuff; stuff that they really, really don’t want to be involved in. Here’s another case study… Cisco’s upcoming ultra-low latency MPI transport is implemented […]
