120 likes | 259 Views
CLUSTER TECHNOLOGIES (Foilene ble også presentert på NOTUR 2003). Anne C. Elster Dept. of Computer & Information Science (IDI) Norwegian Univ. of Science & Tech. (NTNU) Trondheim, Norway. NFR 30. juni, 2003. Clusters (Networks of PCs/Workstation). Are they suitable for HPC? Advantage:
E N D
CLUSTER TECHNOLOGIES(Foilene ble også presentert på NOTUR 2003) Anne C. Elster Dept. of Computer & Information Science (IDI) Norwegian Univ. of Science & Tech. (NTNU) Trondheim, Norway NFR 30. juni, 2003 Anne C. Elster
Clusters (Networks of PCs/Workstation) Are they suitable for HPC? Advantage: Cost-effective hardware since uses COTS (Commercial Of-The-shelf) parts BUT: Typically much slower processor interconectes than traditional HPC systems What about usability? NTNU IDI’s 40-node AMD 1.46GHz cluster 2GB RAM, 40GB disk, Fast Ethernet Anne C. Elster
Cluster Technologies:NOTUR Emerging Technology projectCollaboration between NTNU & Univ. of Tromsø Goal: Analyze Cluster technologies’ suitability for HPC by looking at some of the most interesting NOTUR applications • The results will provide a foundation for decisions regarding future HPC programs Anne C. Elster
Main Collaborators include • Anne C. Elster (IDI, NTNU) – Project leader • Otto Anshus & Tore Larsen (CS, U of Tromsø • Torbjørn Hallgren (IDI, NTNU) • Einar Rønquist (IMF, NTNU) • Master , Ph.D. Students & Post Docs at NTNU and Univ. of Tromsø Anne C. Elster
General Issues to Consider: • Why cluster vs. Powerful desktop vs. Large SMPs? • What are the total costs associated with clusters (harware, software, support, usability) • 32-bit vs. 64-bit architectures Anne C. Elster
Cluster Project ACTIVITIES: • Profiling & Tuning Selected Applications: • Physics and Chemistry Codes (Elster & students, Dept. of Computer Science Dept., NTNU) • Profiling & User-Analysis of Amber, Dalton & Gaussian (Tor Johansen & staff, Comp. Center, U of Tromsø) • Optimization & tool analysis of Dalton (Anshus & PostDoc/student, Dept. of Comp. Sci., U of Tromsø) Anne C. Elster
Cluster Project ACTIVITIES continuted: • Execution Monotoring (Anshus, Tore Larsen & students, CS, U of T) • Visualization servers, etc. (Hallgren, Elster & students, CS, NTNU) • Impact of future numerical algorithms (Rønquist & student, Dept. of Mathematics, NTNU • Interface with NOTUR ET – Grid Project (Elster, Harald Simonsen and colleagues, staff & students associated with the NOTUR ET Cluster & Grid projects) Anne C. Elster
Some cluster issues discovered: • Performance of programs can individually vary on different machines • FORTRAN problems: • Different FORTRAN implementations have non-stardard add-ons (e.g. FORTRAN 90) • Leads to great difficulty in porting code to a different platform with a different Fortran compiler (e.g. by a different vendor) Anne C. Elster
Some cluster issues discovered continued: • Global operations have more severe impact on performance on clusters than traditional supercomputers since communication between processors take relatively more time of total execution time Anne C. Elster
The ”Ideal” Cluster -- Hardware • High-bandwidth network • Low-latency network • Low Operating System overhead (tcp causes ”slow start”) • Great floating-point performance (64-bit?) Anne C. Elster
The ”Ideal” Cluster -- Software • Compiler that is: • Portable • Optimizing • Do extra work to save communication • Self tuning /Load ballanced • Automatically choose best algorithm • One-sided communication support? • Optimized middleware Anne C. Elster
For more information: Poster session at NOTUR • Cluster Project stand - several posters+ smoke simulation demo • Poster by Torbjørn Vik et. al. • Poster by Lars Ailo Bongo Email: elster@computer.org Anne C. Elster