Orion Multisystems Deskside Cluster

NB: This just popped into my in-box... I might just have to stop in to see this little gem.

Orion Multisystems is bringing Personal Supercomputing to Boston!
Be one of the first to see the 96-processor deskside Orion cluster workstation at the upcoming Bio-IT World Conference + Expo taking place May 17-19, 2005 at The Hynes Convention Center in Boston, MA.

So come join us at our first Bio-IT World event and remember to visit us online at http://www.orionmultisystems.com.

Register online at http://www.bio-itworldexpo.com/live/26/register by May 16, 2005 to receive a 25% conference discount or a FREE Exhibit Only Pass. Use the Orion Multisystems PRIORITY CODE: B0623.

For further details, download the conference brochure today!
Visit http://www.bio-itworldexpo.com/live/26/events/26BOS05A/conference/CC881012.

WITH YOUR FREE EXHIBIT ONLY PASS YOU MAY ALSO ATTEND THESE GREAT KEYNOTES:

- Tim Berners-Lee, Director, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Senior Research Scientist, CSAIL, MIT

- J. Craig Venter, PhD, Founder & Chairman of the Board, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), President & Founder, J. Craig Venter Science Foundation (JCVSF) and President & Founder, The J. Craig Venter Institute

For more full keynote details go to
http://www.bio-itworldexpo.com/live/26/events/26BOS05A/keynotes.

We look forward to seeing you at Bio-IT World Conference + Expo in Boston and please make sure to stop by Booth# 517 during your visit.

Sincerely,
ORION MULTISYSTEMS
http://www.bio-itworldexpo.com/live/26/events/26BOS05A/exposition/exhibitorinfo//QMONYA04N9O2

*NOTE: Valid for new registrations only. This offer cannot be redeemed for cash or used in conjunction with any other offer. All registration fees are non-refundable and credentials are non-transferable.

Having a bad day working on your cluster?

The folks organizing ClusterWorld Summit in May want to hear from you about "Why Clusters Suck?" Seriously though, this is a way to contribute to the Cluster Agenda which will be developed at the ClusterWorld Summit. The Agenda will become a road map that details best practices and help navigate the important choice points facing users of cluster technology.

Excellent Cluster Resource

ClusterWorld Magazine is a fantastic resource for both new and experienced Cluster admins. This month's issue has a great article on MDS, the Globus Monitoring and Discovery System.

More @Homes

Einstein@Home, a grid project searching for the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein nearly a century ago, was launched on my birthday (Feb 19). 50,000 people have downloaded Einstein@Home and, according to NewScientist.com, more than 1,000 people a day are still joining.

PlanetQuest is another grid project based on BOINC, the same open-source engine as SETI@Home. Clients with the PlanetQuest client installed will process packages of data collected from telescopes around the world with the ultimate goal of finding new planets. One cool thing about PlanetQuest is they will let you name planets found through computation performed on your computer. How cool would it be to send a probe to Planet Roberta? ;-)

Quiet Supercomputing

Sounds like an oxymoron to me...

However, Microway just announced WhisperStation, a 64-bit workstation that is so quiet you might not even know it's on!

HPC Events for May 2005

May 1-6, 20
Networld + Interop 2005
Las Vegas, NV

May 2-4, 2005
NSDI 2005 Symposium
Boston, MA

May 4-6, 2005
Workshop on Patterns in High Performance Computing
Champaign-Urbana, IL

May 9-12, 2005
Cluster Computing And Grid
Cardiff, UK

May 9-12, 2005
International Conference on Computational Science and its Applications
(ICCSA 2005)
Singapore

May 10-12, 2005
International Conference on Biologically Inspired Computing and Computers in Biology (BICCIB'05)
Banff, Alberta, Canada

May 16-19, 2005
Cray User Group: Petroglyphs to Petaflops
Albuquerque, New Mexico

May 17-19, 2005
Bio-IT World Conference & Expo
Boston, MA

May 22-25, 2005
Gelato Federation May 2005 Meeting
"Understanding Your Itanium System to Maximize Performance"
San Jose, CA

May 23-25, 2005
3rd Annual National Conference for High Performance Computing Technology
Knoxville, TN

Grid Cafe

I just stumbled upon this site: Grid Cafe

It's a wonderful resource from CERN that will teach you what a Grid is, how it works, and what it can do. There is also a brief history section and a good description of how Grids are used at CERN.

I strongly encourage anyone new to the concept of Grid to check it out.

Apple Cluster Seminar Recap

I attended a very informative seminar held by Apple Computer on High Performance Computing in the Sciences. The speakers were Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, Director of the Terascale Computing Facility at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Kevin Kelleher, a sys admin from Mt. Sinai Medical Center, Mark McInnis from Apple, and two speakers from Etnus, makers of the TotalView Debugger.

My overall impressions are:

1. System X is a hot machine.
With 1100 Dual Processor 2.3 GHz Apple Xserve servers, System X is #7 on the Top 500 Supercomputer List and is capable of 12.25 Teraflops. It's also hot in temperature -- VA Tech had to spend $500K on a Liebert XDV (extreme-density vertical cooling) system to keep System X from overheating. If the cooling system fails it takes only seconds for the computer room to reach 150 degrees F.

2. System X is affordable.
VA Tech paid about $5.7 million for System X. This figure is well within reach for many academic and government institutions as well as corporate budgets.

3. System X is easy to use.
Using Mac OS X Panther, the basic interface to the cluster is the user friendy Mac UI that we all know and love. There is a lot of software available for OS X, probably more scientific programs are available for OS X right now than for Itanium 2. There is MPI support, great math libraries, and of course, OS X is really a FreeBSD variant, so all the Unix tools are there as well!

If you want to know more about System X, see:
http://www.tcf.vt.edu

If you want to know more about the Apple Xserve G5, see:
http://www.apple.com/xserve/

Apple Clusters

Apple Computer is hosting a seminar on High Performance Computing in the Sciences... it's a multi-city tour. I'll be attending the one in New York tomorrow. Look here to see if the tour is coming to a city near you!

Strategies for Grid Application Enablement

IBM has defined six strategies for grid application enablement.

In a nutshell:
Strategy 1: Batch Anywhere
Strategy 2: Independent Concurrent Batch
Strategy 3: Parallel Batch
Strategy 4: Service
Strategy 5: Parallel Services
Strategy 6: Tightly Coupled Parallel Programs

Teaching about Clusters and Grids

I found an interesting paper about how to structure a college course on Clusters... There is a similar one on Grids on the ACM website, but I believe you need to be a member of their Digital Library to access it. My alma mater is still teaching students to program in COBOL!!?!??! Get out there and teach a class at your local college or university!

Is that a Cluster under your desk, or are you just happy to see me?

This has been on the market for a while... I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who is actually using one.

Books on my nightstand...

Two new books on Linux Clusters that are keeping me up late...


High Performance Linux Clusters: With Oscar, Rocks, openMosix, and MPI (Nutshell Handbooks) by Joseph D. Sloan



Beowulf Cluster Computing with Linux, Second Edition by William Gropp, Ewing Lusk, Thomas Sterling

High Performance Computing Events - April 2005

April 2-8, 2005

HPC 2005: The 13th High Performance Computing Symposium
San Diego, CA

April 4, 2005

19th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium
Denver, CO

April 11-13, 2005

HPC User Forum
Location: Sundance, UT

April 12-14, 2005

National High Performance Computing and Communications Council 19th Annual HPC Conference
Newport, RI

April 25-28, 2005

6th International Conference on Linux Clusters: the HPC Revolution 2005
Chapel Hill, NC

April 26-27, 2005

Computational Engineering and Science Conference
Washington, DC

451 Group says software licensing hampering commercial grid adoption

See: http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3490886 for more information.

For those of you interested in Scientific apps, both Matlab and Mathematica offer reasonably priced cluster licensing... well, at least reasonable relative to their standard pricing.

Save the Grids!

The National Collaboratories program, part of the Department of Energy's Office of Science, is being threatened by budget cuts. Carl Kesselman, Globus co-founder, said "The termination of the National Collaboratories program will have an enormously disruptive effect on national and international eScience projects, effectively ceasing all research, development and support for large amounts of distributed systems and collaborative software."

Cuts to this program mean that the entity that developed things like GridFTP, AccessGrid, and the Java CoG will essentially disappear.

For Carl's open letter to the Globus community and to learn more about what you can do to help, see: http://www-unix.globus.org/mail_archive/discuss/2005/02/msg00441.html

Digipede Technologies .NET-based grid solution

Digipede Technologies is offering a Microsoft .NET-based grid computing solution. The Team Edition allows for up to 20 "agents", while the Professional Edition for an "unlimited" number.

More information:
http://www.digipede.net

SGI has a grid strategy

Well, well, well... my 'friends' over at SGI claim to have a grid strategy...

http://www.gridcomputingplanet.com/news/article.php/3490071

IBM Rents out BlueGene

It looks like IBM is following Sun's lead and offering compute time on BlueGene...

See http://www.gridcomputingplanet.com/news/article.php/3489256 for more information.

Welcome to the first post on Grid and Cluster Computing! The purpose of this blog is to keep those interested in Grid and Cluster Computing up-to-date on news and events regarding these topics and to provide a place for collaboration and discussion.

Enjoy!
Roberta