sc07 Monday Tuesday
Monday Microsoft had a reception at the Reno Art Museum. The opening talk was really good. The speaker showed how the Top500 list has some good trends that have happened over the years of the list. One nice fact was, his laptop reached over 1GFlop/s which was the the same as the #500 machine in 1994. The vast improvements in power and size has been just wonderful. The most important topic was a library called PLASMA (Parallel Linear Algebra Software for Multicore Architectures). This would be the next-gen update to things like BLAS and LAPACK (LAPACK was already the update to LINPACK). Here are some slides on PLASMA though they are not the ones from the talk. Plasma Slides. I would really like some feedback on memory bandwidth from main memory vs. flops/s. The Cell Cpu was discussed as a example for these cases. The next version of the cell claims 100Gflop/s double precision. Current DDR in the nodes we have at the CAC is around 5GByte/s per memory controller. Ok follow the math: 5GBs / 100 GFlop = 51MBytes/s per Gflop, 51 KBytes/Mflop. It looks like this is fine for Blas level 3 when you can get your ratio of floating point operations to slow memory reference to n/2. But what about Blas2 ? Many codes still require this what pressure can be placed on the industry to up memory performance? Don’t even talk to me about computing on GPU’s and PCI-e speeds. Tudsday The keynote was interesting, way over my head but the thing I took from the talk that I would really like is making devices simple and not require huge amounts of power and development time for home devices. Torque/Moab BOF Personally I love Torque and Moab. Torque is a simple easy to use resource manager I have used it for a while and solves most our problems. Some highlights coming:
- Cpuset support, We really want this, right now users run like mad out our SGI Altix 4700.
- Job arrays, This could be useful. Right now maybe not in our environment. I would like to see this work well enough to make the Matlab DCT (Distributed Cluster Toolkit) tie-ins for PBSPro work with torque.
Moab
- Non-blocking commands
- Job Templates
Some Strange stuff This is my first blog post, and I know I have bad if not awful writing skills, but this is funny (Click to Enlarge):
