Home
Learning About Clusters
Programming Clusters
Administering Clusters
Benchmarking Clusters
File Systems for Clusters
Cluster Applications/Grid
Cluster News
Site Map
 
    Home
Search
Monkey Support
Main Menu
Home
News
Features
Columns
Reviews
Links
FAQ's
Contact
Site Information
Projects
Conference Reports
Cluster Tweaks
Site Map
Add This Article
Login Form





Lost Password?
No account yet? Register
Syndicate

Visit Basement Supercomputing

Cluster Builder

Appro International


Cloud HPC From Amazon
Written by Douglas Eadline   
Thursday, 15 July 2010

Is it time to dump your cluster?

An interesting recent announcement from Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon.com: Today, Amazon Web Services took very an important step in unlocking the advantages of cloud computing for a very important application area. Cluster Computer Instances for Amazon EC2 are a new instance type specifically designed for High Performance Computing applications. HPC resources will be available in "Cluster Compute Instances". The current instance type is:

  • 23 GB of memory
  • 33.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 x Intel Xeon X5570, quad-core “Nehalem” architecture)
  • 1690 GB of instance storage
  • 64-bit platform
  • I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet)

There is a default usage limit for this instance type of 8 instances (providing 64 cores). You can request more instances from Amazon. As far as pricing, the reported price is set at $1.60 per single instance per hour or $12.80 per hour for a cluster instance. Not a bad price if you want to run a few jobs (even overflow work) without investing in new hardware. As I recall, Grid Engine can even be used to submit jobs to your EC2 account.

In terms of performance, LINPACK (HPL) results are on par with similar clusters built with 10 GigE. See Amazon's High Performance Computing (HPC) page for more information.

(   0 Comments   -   Write Comment   -   Rating: 0/5(0)   )
Last Updated ( Thursday, 15 July 2010 )
 
Open-MX 1.3.0 released
Written by Douglas Eadline   
Monday, 12 July 2010

From the start updating department

One of my favorite projects, Open-MX just announced the final release of version 1.3.0. There are only some very minor changes since the last release candidate, mostly a fix for a latency regression. The 1.2.x branch is officially no longer maintained and upgrade to 1.3.0 is strongly recommended.

What is Open-MX You Ask?

Open-MX is a high-performance implementation of the Myrinet Express message-passing stack over generic Ethernet networks. It provides application-level with wire-protocol compatibility with the native MXoE (Myrinet Express over Ethernet) stack.

The following middleware are known to work flawlessly on Open-MX using their native MX backend thanks to the ABI and API compatibility: Open MPI, Argonne's MPICH2/Nemesis, Myricom's MPICH-MX and MPICH2-MX, PVFS2, Intel MPI (using the new TMI interface), Platform MPI (formerly known as HP-MPI), and NewMadeleine.

As soon as time allows, I plan on doing some testing on the new Open-MX version. I have used previous versions and they work quite well.

(   0 Comments   -   Write Comment   -   Rating: 0/5(0)   )
Last Updated ( Monday, 12 July 2010 )
 
Portable Hardware Locality (hwloc)
Written by Douglas Eadline   
Wednesday, 19 May 2010

From the in your neighborhood department

The Hardware Locality (hwloc) team, which is affiliated with the nearby OpenMPI team, has announced the release of version 1.0 of hwloc.

hwloc provides command line tools and a C API to obtain the hierarchical map of key computing elements, such as: NUMA memory nodes, shared caches, processor sockets, processor cores, and processor "threads". hwloc also gathers various attributes such as cache and memory information, and is portable across a variety of different operating systems and platforms.

The hwloc team considers version 1.0 to be the first production-quality release that is suitable for widespread adoption. Please send your feedback on hwloc experiences to our mailing lists (see the web site, above).

Thanks team, keep up the good work, and don't go anywhere.

(   0 Comments   -   Write Comment   -   Rating: 0/5(0)   )
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 19 May 2010 )
 
What Not to Read on ClusterMonkey
Written by Douglas Eadline   
Monday, 10 May 2010

From the "other" department

First things first, I put up a new poll. For me, it an intriguing question that reflects a shift in technology: How would you use a 48 core PC (4P with 12 core Magny-Cours) next to your desk? Does ti mean the end to your cluster use? While you are at it, you may want to think about what you would do with 16 cores under your desk? By the end of the year many people will start making this decision with their wallets. As always, past ClusterMonkey polls can be found here.

Now for a bit of shameless self promotion.

I have been writing quite a lot about clusters and HPC, but it has not landed on ClusterMonkey! Not to worry, I have plenty of ClusterMonkey exclusive content in the pipeline. So what do I recommend? Well, let's start with two articles at HPC Community:

  • The Ethernet Cluster - discusses some issues and standards for the upcoming 10 GigE cluster. Yes, there will be 10 GigE clusters, lot's of them.
  • The Cluster Decade - provides a retrospective for the last ten years and discusses why clusters steam rolled everything in sight (almost), but still have challenges.

Moving over to Linux Magazine, I usually write a column each week, but the other week I wrote one I think everyone should read. I'll give you a hint it is about toasters, no HPC needed. If you want to keep abreast of what I write on Linux Magazine sign up for the HPC newsletter.

And finally, I don't know if mentioned it here previously, but I am on twitter. I'm probably the worst at posting things to twitter, so if you do the twit thing, you can read for my low frequency tweets about new articles or news I find particularly interesting (and nothing about my social life, that should tell you something)

(   0 Comments   -   Write Comment   -   Rating: 0/5(0)   )
Last Updated ( Thursday, 13 May 2010 )
 
Why Models Beat Scripting
Written by Erik Troan   
Friday, 30 April 2010

Editors Note: This article is part two in a two-part series, published under Creative Commons License. For those that may not know, Erik Troan is one of the original authors of RPM (Red Hat Package Manager). As Erik describes, it seems the declarative approach may extend beyond programming languages and into better system management.

I’ve made a couple of posts recently about Why Scripting is Evil. It has generated some conversation about what a script is and what the alternatives are. One commentator must have anticipated this follow-up post when he said:

"So, somewhere in the process, a script is a necessary object, whether it is explicit (written by the user) or inherent (created through abstraction and based on the user’s description of desired outcome)".

In short, the only way to do away with scripting is to create an application that abstracts the scripting process. Automated scripting would then be based on user descriptions of the desired outcome/goal rather than having the user describe the steps to reach said goal.

(   0 Comments   -   Write Comment   -   Rating: 0/5(0)   )
Last Updated ( Sunday, 02 May 2010 )
Read more...
 
<< Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 Next > End >>

Results 1 - 5 of 20
Cluster Courses
Poll
How would you use a 48 core PC (4P with 12 core Magny-Cours) next to your desk?
 
Latest Stories/News
Popular
Cluster Ranting By Eadline
InsideHPC
  • Q&A with John Shalf, chair of the Disruptive Technology showcase at SC10

    I’ve mentioned the Disruptive Technologies event at SC10 a few times recently, and I thought it might be helpful for you guys and gals if we dug in and explored the event, its background, and what it’s all about in a little more depth. SC10 and John Shalf, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the [...]

  • PRACE awards 320 million hours to 10 projects

    This week PRACE announced a big award of computational time to 10 projects in Europe Ten research projects, five from Germany, two from the UK one each from Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal, have been awarded access to the PRACE infrastructure. In total 321.4 Million compute core hours were granted. Sixty-eight applications requesting a total of [...]

  • What to read at insideHPC this week

    Wondering what to read at insideHPC? Some of the most popular posts this week are: Open Grid Forum president says grids not dead yet Industry experts form new Lustre startup New Zealand switches on new IBM SC10 encourages disruptions Sponsored Post: Breaking Through Real World Storage Barriers in Next Generation Sequencing If you aren’t subscribed to our email updates already, your [...]

Who's Online
We have 7 guests online
Worldwide Front Page Visits

Locations of visitors to this page

Monkey Stats
Google PageRank modul - Camelpark SEO centrum

 

Creative Commons License
  ©2005-2008 Seagrove LLC, Some rights reserved. Except where otherwise noted, this site is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Cluster Monkey Logo and Monkey Character are Trademarks of Seagrove LLC.