Building HPC Clusters
In the last installment of our Parallel Platters series, Jeff Layton looks at the next generation of parallel file systems: Object Based File Systems.
As vendors strive for faster processors and denser systems, power and cooling has become a major issue for the HPC market.
The correct choice of I/O & communication interconnects can increase application performance by 2-3x. However, interconnects and their interaction with highly-parallel applications are often not well understood. Learn how the architecture of InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnects impact performance on a variety of applications.
FLOPS are dirt cheap right now. How excited should you really be though?
Now that all of the major processor vendors have introduced multi-core chips, the impact of this relatively new technology on high-performance computing should to be addressed. What will is the immediate impact on HPC application development? And what will "many-cores" ultimately mean for the future of the HPC cluster?
Managing HPC Clusters
Here is your challenge. You have a need for speed, your current computing power is insufficient for the task at hand. You have some large number of calculations to perform, and very little time to achieve this goal. Can you solve this problem? Cost effectively? Quickly?
An often asked question by new HPC cluster users is, What kind of interconnects (networks) are available? This question is important because the network is perhaps the single most important factor in terms of cluster performance. GigE, 10 GigE, Infiniband: Which one is right for you?
What’s stopping clusters from being useful tools?
While implementing and managing a powerful and complex cluster environment can seem like a daunting task, you can make your life much easier and your users more productive by sticking to a few simple rules. Here’s a guide.
Linux clusters have become so successful that they've proliferated internationally through research labs, universities, and large industries that require an inexpensive source of high performance computing cycles. Developers and users have pushed the technology by scaling their applications to more and more processors so that larger problems can be solved more quickly. This has resulted in clusters where some applications can actually become I/O bound -- the input/output of data to/from a large number of processors limits the performance of the application.
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HPC is just beginning to warm up to the idea of green computing. But can green give you a faster, better and cheaper high-performance cluster?
Getting into Ganglia for a scalable and flexible solution to the problem of cluster monitoring.
Using Perceus/Warewulf as your Cluster Management System (CMS) can speed cluster setup and deployment by automating a number of repetitive tasks.
Setting up a cluster can be trying enough, and maintaining it can be even more difficult. The sheer number of nodes involved in a large cluster can be daunting, as can users' expectations for quality of service. To make life easier, Troy Baer provides a tour of tools that every cluster admin should know about.
As 2007 fades away, I thought I would reflect on some of the HPC events of the last twelve months. Having thought about it, though, nothing really stands out in my mind as a big breakthrough or new paradigm shifting technology.
It's time for the yearly batch of retrospectives and predictions. Count me in! Let's see, the big thing of 2007? Well, that had to be multi-core. And, the big prediction for 2008? Why that would be multi-core, once again. There, I'm done. Enjoy your year.
Doug Eadline takes a break from his ranting about multi-core CPUs to rant about another technology that gives him fits: Virtualization.
Trying to get a handle on the HPC community and market has always been difficult. The professional market forecasters seem to paint a rosy picture for HPC over the next five years. But, when I talk to people in the market, I often get a different take.
This week I'd like to take a look at the latest survey results. While the participation was not all that I wanted, it is enough to make sufficiently vague statements about the HPC cluster market.
Learn how graphics processing units are pushing the HPC envelope.
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