HPCwire: The Week in Review

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Features

June 18, 2009

The Week in Review

by John E. West, for HPCwire

Page: 1 of 3
1 | 2 | 3 All »

Here is a collection of highlights, selected totally subjectively, from this week's HPC news stream as reported at insideHPC.com and HPCwire.

10 words and a link

New Bull supercomputer design aims big, green

Appro Xtreme-X1 sports dual dedicated on-board QDR IB links

Chutes packed and ready to be deployed at Sun

Supercomputer used to find largest measured black hole

Matrox intros GPU platform aimed at industrial imaging

Mitrionics announces new SDK for its HPC-oriented FPGA solution

Allinea developing CPU/GPU hybrid debugging tools, aims at 32k cores

Microsoft announces Extreme Computing Group, headed by VP Dan Reed

Computation supports National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program, House finds value

Illinois and France partner on petascale research

UNT builds $2M HPC center

$50M IBM super at U Toronto is Canada's fastest

NVIDIA's OpenCL drivers certified

SC09 conference registration open

Sun sponsors student party at ISC'09

HPC Advisory Council announces programs, workshops

A view from inside the team that built (and debugged) the Wolfram|Alpha HPC infrastructure

We wrote in mid-May about the HPC resources being used to power Wolfram's new Alpha computational portal:

When Wolfram|Alpha launches, it will be one of the most computationally intensive websites on the internet....What computing power have we gathered in these facilities for launch day? Two supercomputers, just about 10,000 processor cores, hundreds of terabytes of disks, a heck of a lot of bandwidth, and what seems like enough air conditioning for the Sahara to host a ski resort.

But what about getting it all to work before launch day? That story is chronicled by one of the guys from the inside team in this post at the Wolfram|Alpha blog. It's interesting because it shows that these things rarely go smoothly:

Given the broader audience the product was becoming viable for and given the public response that we had seen so far, what should we forecast as peak launch demand? How about being able to handle a peak of 2000 queries per second, ten times the earlier plan? Since we hadn't even talked to a supercomputer vendor yet with about two months to go until launch, we had moved from prudent to very aggressive on both time frame and target.

Wolfram worked with R Systems and Dell to build out the two supers that serve as the primary engines behind Alpha.

We were then just days before launch, that put us with 140 nodes at our disposal, and final load testing could proceed. One cluster of the big Dell system handled 130 qpsâ€”check. Two clusters got 260 qps. We were cooking. Three clusters, 210. Uh oh. Four clusters, 120. !?@#%^. Maybe it was just a glitch. We tried it again, but round two didn't fare any better. It was time for an emergency meeting. Everyone was on the case (Jeff and his systems engineering guys, plus Chris, Jamie, Grant, Mike, Oyvind, and many other folks), working non-stop to figure out the bottleneck. Something must have been thrashing, but what was the problem? The test rig? It checked out. The edge switch? That checked out, too. Ditto on the other end of the line. Core switch? Also fine. Was logging slowing us down? Nope. Were any of the databases saturated? Looked okay. The test log implied packet loss, as did the web server logs.

Page: 1 of 3
1 | 2 | 3 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html