The Indiana University Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies (CREST) has been part of the OpenHPC community effort since it was launched November 12, 2015. In a recent Q&A with OpenHPC, Professor Thomas Sterling, associate director and chief scientist of CREST, explains the basis for the partnership.
As the father of Beowulf clusters, developed in collaboration with Don Becker, Professor Sterling has experienced first-hand the singular power of community-wide involvement. He sees a similar potential in OpenHPC.
When I did the Beowulf Project, totally by accident we ended up pretty much starting, in the realm of supercomputing, the use of the Linux operating system for commodity clusters; not by doing anything wonderful or brilliant, but by filling in a desperate gap with Ethernet drivers. We did this because we were looking for low-cost. And because Berkeley Software stack, which was funded by DARPA, was being litigated against by AT&T. At that time, my team and I were supported by NASA, and NASA would not allow us to use BSD which we otherwise would have for our experiments in scientific cluster computing. So having been – in those days – a hacker – the good kind! – and associated with people like Don Becker who were already playing with piles of floppy disks from Linus’ activities, I realized that there was a possibility to achieve our goals if we made necessary contributions. So Linux, which now dominates supercomputing, something in excess of 95% of the world’s supercomputers run one of many distributions of Linux, that was one of the contributions we made.
What was important was the fact that no one – individual or small group – could literally create a whole new class of supercomputing. But many people, across the country and around the world, could together. By associating ourselves with an emergent framework, in which we could benefit from the work of many different people interested in different things but under a unifying guidance of scaffolding interfaces, we were able to achieve our objectives in low cost, HPC for end users.
If, and I have to say if, OpenHPC does this right, you will provide that framework. And CREST could be a proactive contributor that others can benefit from. Or if they desire to go forward without our work, they can choose to do so. But ideally our work in runtime systems will complement the work of others.
We’re focusing on determining how to make dynamic adaptive execution work for architectures and operating systems and runtime systems and programming interfaces. Our principal contribution, other than our conceptual work and our experimental work, is in the deployment of the HPX-5 runtime system. That’s why we want to be part of OpenHPC.
The key thing here is the opportunity to integrate with others without intruding. We’re looking for a win-win opportunity.
Read the full Q&A for more details on the ParalleX execution model and the HPX-5 runtime system.