sc07 Wednesday
Wednesday:
I am really starting to see allot of PMPI tools. I personally like OPT from Allinea. While OPT may not have all the features of Tau and others and its not free I really think they do a good job presenting data to users in a simple way. When I spoke with Allinea at their both yesterday i really felt they have momentum and have a customer focus.
Some things I would like to see in OPT though:
- More PAPI Hardware Counters
- Support for Serial programs
- Profile information from functions that don’t call MPI functions
- Speed up database operations for large profile runs
In all I have been happy with the tool and have confidence they will add the missing features to match if not pass Tau and friends.
These guys make the wonderful Moab scheduler we use at U of M. We saw a neat tool they had made with a visual effects lab called Y-Film (sorry no link) to simplify all the rendering needed to be done on a day to day basis. The user can do cool thinks like ‘render every 10th frame’ or ‘render backwards’ to see how their work is coming. This is really cool its user level allows artists who normally are stuck with just their desktop until they make their final project to speed up production time by using a cluster. On top of that their cluster was made up PS3’s as a supported configuration to keep the price even lower for small shops. The PS3 was fast also a frame that took 90 seconds on his Mac Book Pro with 2GHz core Duo took 90 seconds vs ~40 on the PS3 at half the cost. Neat tool.
After this we met with CR about how Moab has been working for us and some issues we had. These guys are great, they really cared about what we had to say they treated us very well even though they now have many larger customers (Amazon Yahoo LLNL etc).
To close turns out my boss Andy Caird is now famous (Click for Larger):
Gallery:
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