SCIENCE

CHAMPAIGN, IL -- The Linux Clusters Institute (LCI), a group aimed at providing advanced technical training for the deployment of high-performance Linux computing clusters, will hold its first workshop Oct. 1-5 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The LCI was founded by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center (AHPCC) at the University of New Mexico, and the Advanced Computing Technology Center at IBM Research. The LCI includes some of the world's foremost specialists in building and deploying Linux clusters at NCSA, AHPCC, and IBM, who are also responsible for developing and teaching the workshops. "This is only the first of what will be many LCI workshops," said John Towns, director of NCSA's Scientific Computing Division and a member of the LCI. "Our purpose is to provide a service to computational scientists, systems administrators, and prospective users of Linux clusters so that this exciting new computing format can be used to its fullest potential. The information that we will provide is what application developers and system administrators need but can't find elsewhere." Those who plan to participate in the October workshop must register by Sept. 4 and are encouraged to register early since space is limited to 20 people. A second person from the same institution can participate at a much reduced cost by sharing a workstation. Participants should bring their own applications, problems, and questions with them to the workshop. Registration details, including information on accommodations, are available at the LCI website: www.linuxclustersinstitute.org/ Each LCI workshop will span a full week and consist of two modules: *The first module will last two days and cover systems administration and management issues. Participants will learn about issues related to administering Linux clusters in support of secure, reliable, high-performance computing. Topics will include networking, remote administration, job scheduling, account management, security, backup, monitoring tools, and tools and scripts used for common tasks. *The second module will run for three days and focus on developing and optimizing Linux cluster applications. Users and prospective users will learn about configuring, acquiring, and using Linux clusters. Topics will include Intel architecture details, memory subsystem and cache tuning, CPU tuning (including SSE/vectorization), multithreaded code optimization, distributed memory optimization using MPI, graphical debugging with TotalView, hardware performance toolkit, MPI tracing tools, and dynamic instrumentation tools. Participants can choose to attend either or both modules. In addition to the October workshop in Urbana-Champaign, the LCI is planning a workshop Jan. 7-11, 2002, at AHPCC in Albuquerque, NM, and March 11-15, 2002, at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. Additional workshops are planned for 2002 across the U.S. and in Europe and Asia.