GOVERNMENT

By Gary Montry -- The morning began with the keynote presentation from Peter Ungaro, titled "From Beowulf to Cray-o-wulf - Extending the Linux Clustering Paradigm to Supercomputing Scale." In this presentation Peter unveils Cray's view of cluster computing and how they are going to compete in the HPC marketplace with future generations of clusters containing ten thousand to one million cores. He predicts a one million core system within five years. For scale, today's entire Top 500 list represents less than one million cores! His argument, and well-founded, is that commodity Linux clusters are too generalized to provide reliability, availability and scalability when scaled past about one thousand sockets. One example: a typical cluster rack has anywhere from 200 – 300 fans. A "mean-time-to-failure" (MTBF) analysis of the cooling fans in a system with ten racks results in an average fan failure rate of one every 26 hours. On the XT-4 Cray has reduced the fan count to one per rack (a very big fan!). This complexity reduction also applies to software. A lightweight OS-provisioned system outscales a Linux-based cluster with as few as sixty four processors (Ron Brightwell, SNLA). Cray expects that future superclusters (my term) will require custom value-added simplifications in order to successfully scale and that they can make a business of providing this service to the HPC marketplace. Clearly, the message coming from all of the speakers is that the system complexity of the largest supercomputers has become the driving factor in the delivery of product to the HPC user community. Unfortunately, I do not have time to report the remaining last day of the meeting. The rest of the day will cover more vendor talks (Cray, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel) followed by some interesting I/O talks and discussions. Gary Montry is an independent software consultant specializing in parallel applications development and optimization and in attached processor software. Gary can be reached at gary@spsoft.com