Samford University Virtual Supercomputer

(SUVS)Brian Toone

4/14/09

Outline

• Motivation• Concepts• Demo

Motivation (in pictures)

Motivation (in pictures)

Motivation (in words)

• Large datasets– geographic information systems– bioinformatics– chemistry– physics– environmental modeling

• A single Dell office computer can’t handle the load, but… what if we use more than one?!

Motivation, cont’d

• We have a plethora of computers that are idle a large majority of the time

• Let’s take advantage of the hardware investment that has already been made to provide computing power to enable research tasks on traditionally computationally intractable problems

What’s the catch?

• Sounds almost too good to be true• It is and it isn’t– easy – providing an environment to connect

computers together … BOINC!– challenge – creating parallel algorithms to run on

the computing environment– challenge – making it easy for programmers and

scientists to submit work

Concepts• Technical term – non-dedicated cluster– set of computers whose idle time is harnessed to

process jobs– individual nodes in the cluster function as standalone

computers– in laymen’s terms: “let’s hook a bunch of lab

computers together”• Software environment – BOINC– powers many worldwide projects (e.g., SETI@home,

World Community Grid, climateprediction.net, etc…)– step-by-step instructions (minus the details) of how to

build a campus virtual supercomputer

Can we build a supercomputer?

• Yes – with campus-wide buy-in• Let’s start on a smaller scale…– Here we have five computers – With 5 computers – Florida export ~1 day– Adding additional computers is easy(<5min setup)– With 40 computers - Florida export in ~2 hours

Usage scenarios

• Simplest scenario• Non-parallel application with long runtime• You don’t want your office or lab computer

tied up running the computation• Solution: submit your non-parallel app to the

cluster using an easy-to-use web interface!

Usage scenarios

• Build or convert an existing parallel application• Four components– Work generator– The client program– Result validator– Result assimilator

Usage scenarios

• Classroom tool– networking– databases– algorithms and data structures– parallel computing– hardware

Languages supported

• C/C++ have the best support• Java• Any arbitrary executable (with a catch!)

Demo

• Simple example (embarrassingly parallel)Calculate the sum of all the numbers between 1 and 100,000,000,000

• No modifications necessary to original Java program as long as it already reads its starting and ending numbers from the command line

Demo source code

• Java application

Demo source code, cont’d

• Work generator

• Assimilator

Getting Involved

• Become a beta tester for usage scenario 1(i.e., the web application for uploading an app to run on the cluster)

• Suggest a project for collaboration, and I will assist in the conversion process

Thank you!

• More information about the project can be found on my faculty web page:http://faculty.samford.edu/~brtoone

Questions?