Intel stretches HPC dev tools across chubby clusters

SC11 Supercomputing hardware and software vendors are getting impatient for the SC11 supercomputing conference in Seattle, which kicks off next week. More than a few have jumped the gun with product announcements this week, including chipmaker Intel.

No, Intel is not going to launch its "Sandy Bridge-EP" Xeon E5 processors, which are expected early next year. But the new Cluster Studio XE toolset for HPC customers will help those lucky few HPC and cloud shops that have been able to get systems this year to squeeze more performance out of their Xeon E5 clusters.

The Cluster Studio XE stack includes a slew of Intel tools for creating, tuning, and monitoring parallel applications running on x86-based parallel clusters. Intel had already been selling a set of application tools called Cluster Studio, which bundled up the chip giant's C, C++, and Fortran compilers, its rendition of the message passing interface (MPI) messaging protocol that allows server nodes to share work, and various math and multithreading libraries to goose the performance of applications.

With the XE (Extended Edition) of the HPC cluster tools, Intel is goosing the performance of the MPI library, and claims its MPI 4.0.3 stack is anywhere from 3.3 to 6.5 times as fast as the OpenMPI 1.5.4 and MVAPICH2 1.6 MPI stacks from the open source community. Benchmark tests were done on a 64-node system running 768 processes and linked by InfiniBand switches.

Intel tested the Platform Computing MPI 8.1.1 stack against the three MPI stacks listed above, only this time on an eight-mode system; in this case the performance differences between Intel and Platform (which is now owned by IBM) were not huge. With the Microsoft MPI 3.2 stack on the same iron, the Intel MPI stack running on Windows servers was anywhere from 2.17 to 2.74 times faster than the Microsoft MPI.

Read full story at theregister.co.uk

IBM brings supercomputing storage into the cloud

IBM has announced a new network storage array that was based around its supercomputing platforms down to enterprise level.

The Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) system uses between one and 30 storage ‘pods,’ containing a storage node, a storage controller and attached 15,000 or 7,200 drives. These can be scaled up to a claimed 14.4 petabytes of storage.

“Companies not only need to cost-effectively store that data, but they need to rapidly locate it and provide ubiquitous access to it instantly. SONAS addresses these needs and provide clients with the right scalable solution.” said Doug Balog, vice president of disk systems for IBM.

The technology behinds SONAS was originally developed as part of General Parallel File System (GPFS), which the company has used on its supercomputing platform for 5 around 10 years.

SONAS also comes with an integrated Tivoli Storage Manager backup/archive client, up to 256 snapshots per file system, and support for modern RAID systems and network protocols, including CIFS, NFS, the Secure Copy Protocol (SCP), HTTP and FTP.

(This news sourced from http://www.v3.co.uk)

The winner is Jaguar!

The 34th TOP500 List released November 17th in Portland, Oregon at the SC09 Conference.

A PDF version of the TOP500 Report distributed during SC09 can be found here.

In its third run to knock the IBM supercomputer nicknamed “Roadrunner” off the top perch on the TOP500 list of supercomputers, the Cray XT5 supercomputer known as Jaguar finally claimed the top spot on the 34th edition of the closely watched list.

Jaguar, which is located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and was upgraded earlier this year, posted a 1.75 petaflop/s performance speed running the Linpack benchmark. Jaguar roared ahead with new processors bringing the theoretical peak capability to 2.3 petaflop/s and nearly a quarter of a million cores. One petaflop/s refers to one quadrillion calculations per second.

Kraken, another upgraded Cray XT5 system at the National Institute for Computational Sciences/University of Tennessee, claimed the No. 3 position with a performance of 832 teraflop/s (trillions of calculations per second).

At No. 4 is the most powerful system outside the U.S. -- an IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer located at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) in Germany. It achieved 825.5 teraflop/s on the Linpack benchmark and was No. 3 in June 2009.

Rounding out the top 5 positions is the new Tianhe-1 (meaning River in Sky) system installed at the National Super Computer Center in Tianjin, China and to be used to address research problems in petroleum exploration and the simulation of large aircraft designs. The highest ranked Chinese system ever, Tianhe-1 is a hybrid design with Intel Xeon processors and AMD GPUs used as accelerators. Each node consists of two AMD GPUs attached to two Intel Xeon processors.