Compaq - Indiana University Visit

IU’s Compaq Parallel PC Cluster

Clusters Becoming more widespread Benefits:

Cost, price/performance Familiar operating system choices Commodity components

Issues: Interconnect/appropriate application

space Tools (administrator and user)

32 Compaq ProLiant 1850R compute nodes: Dual 400 MHz Intel PII processors 256 MB SDRAM, 512kB L2 cache Two 4.3 GB “hot-plug” SCSI disks Integrated 10/100 TX Ethernet interface and Packet Engines G-NIC

II Ethernet interface 3 controls workstation (NT Primary Domain Server, NT Terminal

Server, Linux development system)

IU’s Compaq Cluster

Fast Ethernet: HP ProCurve 4000M 10/100Base-TX Switch

Gigabit Ethernet: Packet Engines PowerRail 5200 Switch. GB interconnect still largely experimental

Parallel PC Cluster Interconnect

Parallel PC Cluster

Unique features of IU’s Compaq cluster

Evenhanded approach to OS issues. Key questions: Which is better under what circumstances? How can we make our scientists most productive?

Combination of computer science research, (production) scientific calculation, and artistic applications

Robustness of system Relationship with NCSA

NT and Linux Each compute node can be run under either

NT or Linux (reboot required). Default configuration of the Parallel PC

Cluster is 16 nodes Linux, 16 nodes NT For experiments & code that scales to 64

processors, cluster run under one OS Future need: more flexible control over OS

configuration

Linux Clusters

NT Clusters

Clusters running NT & Linux

Accomplishments to date

Investigation of system management tools

NT/Linux comparisons Gigabit Ethernet investigation Price/performance characterization Use of applications software for

production use

OS and system software choices

NT System monitoring & mgmt:

Big Brother Compaq Insight Manager

Job management: LSF Compilers:

Microsoft Visual Studio Digital Visual Fortran Portland Group Suite

Parallel APIs MPI (MPI/Pro) PVM

Linux System monitoring:

Big Brother Job management: PBS Software Development

GNU C/C++/F77 Portland Group Suite

Parallel APIs MPICH PVM

System monitoring -Big Brother (NT & Linux)

System monitoring & management - Compaq Insight Manager

System monitoring & management - Compaq Insight Manager

System management with Linux

Pallas MPI BenchmarksMaximum Throughput

Pallas MPI BenchmarksLatency

NT MPI BenchmarksMaximum Throughput

NAS Parallel Benchmarks

QCD Benchmark

Compiler issues

Under NT, Digital Visual Fortran tends to perform the best

Compilers for Linux are a substantial issue. GNU compilers have poor optimization for Pentuim processors. Code that one would expect to run well can run very poorly.

Price/Performance

For applications well suited to PC clusters, Price/Performance of the Compaq Parallel PC Cluster is better than a traditional supercomputer by a factor of 3 to nearly a factor of 10

Using QCD code developed at IU, the P/P ratios are <$100/MFLOP vs ~$300/MFLOP

Application Software

Radiance DART SoftImage AutoCAD Gaussian 3DStudioMax (to be installed)

Scientific & artistic projects

Physics: Quantum Chromodynamics Astrophysics: 3-D Hydrodynamics Engineering: Computational Fluid Dynamics UITS: cluster performance research Television animation production (WTIU): Parallel

Rendering of animations Virtual Reality: Distributed Ray Tracing, Volume

Visualization

WTIU Video

Volume Visualization

Future Projects

Computer Science: Component architectures, Distributed Objects (e.g. CAT, DCOM, ActiveX, JavaBeans)

NCSA-related activities: Globus, distributed performance testing with NCSA, superclusters

Environmental Science: Groundwater modelling

Cat Workspace and Info Browser

PC Cluster Grid Computing SC98 iGrid demonstrations

included PC clusters used IU is positioned to participate in the

development of PC superclusters Abilene, TransPAC, vBNS,

EuroLink connectivity NCSA Alliance institution DOE2000 participation APAN membership

iGrid Sites

vBNS ESNet NREN

TeleglobeCANTAT-3

CA*Net2TransPAC(to APAN)

TANet

SINGAren

Issues/areas for further investigation

Cluster management tools for NT and Linux, incl. ability to reboot single and multiple workstations with OS selection

User filespace under NT Compilers Network Performance, esp. Gigabit

ethernet VIA vs. Kernel I/O networking

Conclusions

IU has assembled a robust Parallel PC Cluster based on Compaq servers

Both NT and Linux have areas of strength, areas of weakness

The IU Parallel PC Cluster can be used for production work in the sciences and arts under either NT or Linux

Thanks to:

Don Berry Dave Hart Dan Lauer Rick McMullen John Naab Anurag Shankar Shawn Slavin Teresa Todd

Compaq - Indiana University Visit

Thank you.

Any questions?

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