HPCwire: The Week in Review

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June 18, 2009

The Week in Review

by John E. West, for HPCwire

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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.

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