December 10, 2010
BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Dec. 10 -- A paper co-authored by Dr. Andrew Lumsdaine, director of the Open Systems Lab (OSL) at the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute, and former OSL researchers Torsten Hoefler (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Timo Schneider (University of Technology Chemnitz) has received Supercomputing 2010's Best Paper accolade. As the premier annual international supercomputing conference, Supercomputing 2010 (SC10) drew thousands of participants from all over the world.
The paper, "Characterizing the Influence of System Noise on Large-Scale Applications by Simulation," analyzes the impact of system noise, or communication delays, on the performance of large-scale applications running on multiple computer processors connected over a network.
"Torsten did an excellent job presenting this paper," said Lumsdaine. "We were up against papers from some of the best and brightest minds in supercomputing. We are honored to receive the top award."
The researchers found that system noise impacts applications running across slower networks less than those running across faster ones. When system noise creates a bottleneck, it eliminates any advantage a faster network may have. This finding is crucial for the design of large-scale systems, because the noise bottleneck must be considered when a system is designed.
"The committee believes that this is likely to be the definitive paper in a debate on the impact of system noise that has been going on for a decade," added Barbara Chapman, technical papers co-chair at Supercomputing 2010.
Additionally, the team proposed a model that suggests that non-blocking operations can be used to reduce noise. Non-blocking operations are those that can proceed even if a previous operation is suspended, thereby eliminating the need to wait for a previous action to finish.
The full paper is available at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1884668.
About Pervasive Technology Institute
Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) at Indiana University is a world-class organization dedicated to the development and delivery of innovative information technology to advance research, education, industry, and society. Supported in part by a $15-million grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc., PTI is built upon a spirit of collaboration and brings together researchers and technologists from a range of disciplines and organizations, including the IU School of Informatics and Computing at Bloomington, the IU Maurer School of Law, and University Information Technology Services at Indiana University. For more information, see http://pti.iu.edu.
-----
Source: Indiana University
In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
Read more...
In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
Read more...
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...
May 23, 2013 |
The study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
Read more...
May 22, 2013 |
At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
Read more...
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.