On The Road
Cluster Symposium
By Ric Kositzke
When the ARL MSRC announced the installation and integration of the 286-processor Linux Networx Evolocity II system July 16, officials hoped that its cluster technology would free up the larger high performance computers to work on bigger, more time-intensive projects.
Cluster technology - which, by definition, contains a group of computers called nodes that communicates over a high-speed network to complete projects too large to solve on a single computer - is cheaper than larger HPCs. But what other benefits are associated with the clusters?
To answer that question and many more, the ARL MSRC, Raytheon and the Ohio Supercomputer Center sponsored a symposium July 22-23 at the Holiday Inn in Tysons Corner, Va., to study the challenges associated with commodity clusters for large-scale scientific applications.
After the symposium, the 150 attendees were asked to evaluate the symposium and to give feedback. Of the 50 attendees who returned the evaluations, a common theme was present: The symposium was timely, informative and well organized. The attendees, a cross-section of government, academia, and industry respresentativies, also wanted a similar symposium next year.
Interest in the symposium was fueled by the increasing popularity of commodity clusters as a low-cost alternative to the more traditional specialty, high-performance computing systems built by traditional HPC computer companies.
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| Dr. Randy Frank, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, gives a keynote presentation durin the Scientific Visualization session. |
The list of speakers was a virtual list of who's who in commodity cluster computing and included such well-known leaders in the area as Cray Henry, David Nelson, Jack Dongarra, Charles Nietubicz, William Feiereisen, Gene Bal, Randy Frank, and Earl Joseph.
Subject areas covered key issues associated with commodity clusters: The Technology Trends session dealt with both hardware and software trends and gave attendees insight into new technologies currently under development such as Inifiband and IA64 processors, advances in administrative and management tools, as well as software development tools such as debuggers, profilers, and compilers. The Production Issues session covered practical concerns associated with running and maintaining large commodity clusters in a production computer environment. The Computational Issues session discussed developer and user issues associated with development and execution of large scientific simulations on these systems. Finally, the Scientific Visualization session dealt with the state-of-the-art visualization methods and tools for commodity clusters. A reception sponsored by Aspen Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, and Linux Networx, leading vendors in the commodity cluster market, was held the evening of July 22.
The organizers of the symposium wanted to make sure that vendors knew that the symposium was not a trade show, but rather a forum to give attendees critical, revealing answers about cluster computing.
When users began using the Linux-based clusters this month, few probably could tell the difference between the clusters and larger HPCs. And that's just the way ARL MSRC wants it.
Users will have access to cluster training and unlimited tech support. But before that can happen, however, clusters need to pass the litmus test: successful operation in a highly stressful, 24/7 environment.
Nevertheless, because of the outstanding response and requests from the attendees and reception sponsors, another expanded symposium will be held on commodity clusters in the July 2004 time frame. The symposium location will be in the Washington - Baltimore area.