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ARSC HPC Specialists
Ed Kornkven (left) and Tom Baring (center)
with Nathan Brasher during the U.S. Naval Academy
Midshipman's stay as an intern at the center.
Brasher worked consecutively with Cadet Mike
Rose, U.S. Air Force Academy, on a project
to study parameters that affect I/O performance
on the center's Cray X1, Klondike.
U.S. Air Force
Cadet Mike Rose takes a break from his benchmarking
work on the Cray X1.
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Military Academy Summer Research
Program
During Summer 2004, ARSC continued its participation in
the Military Academies Summer Research Program, a coordinated
effort with the Department of Defense's (DoD) High Performance
Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) to increase collaboration
between the military and HPCMP centers. This summer, the
center hosted Cadet Mike Rose, from the U.S. Air Force
Academy, and Midshipman Nathan Brasher from the U.S. Naval
Academy. The two worked at the center consecutively on
the same project, for three weeks each. Both students worked
under ARSC Associate Director Barbara Horner-Miller and
were directed by ARSC HPC Specialists Ed Kornkven and Tom
Baring.
Rose and Brasher's mission at ARSC was to study parameters
that affect input and output performance on Klondike, the
center's Cray X1. Klondike is a scalable vector system
composed of 128 multistreaming processors, giving it a
peak performance of 1.6 teraflops (trillion floating point
operations per second). The X1 has 512 gigabytes of RAM
and 21 terabytes of disk storage.
The Project
The connection between processors and I/O devices in supercomputers
is a bottleneck and a major obstacle in achieving good
computing performance. Processors and memory are solid
state devices and orders of magnitude faster than disk
drives, which are mechanical devices. Optimizing I/O efficiency
to the spinning disks can reduce run times and improve
performance of many users' codes.
The students collected I/O bandwidth data on the X1 by
writing files and evaluating the file access method, file
format, buffer size, chunk size, and blocking scheme. The
results are published in issues 296 and 297 of the ARSC
HPC Users' Newsletter.
The results of this project provided useful information
for ARSC staff, said Baring. Being able to put the final
report in the ARSC HPC Users' Newsletter is a service to
users and may help others use the system more efficiently.
In addition to work at the center, Rose and Brasher had
the opportunity to experience dorm life outside of a military
academy as well as socialize with students from around
the country who were also working at ARSC as part of the
center’s NSF-funded Alaska Research Summer Challenge
intern program. [Back to Top]
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Frank Williams
ARSC Director
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From the Director
ARSC has embarked on an exciting experiment an experiment
that we believe will result in better service for our
users and more access to our systems. As of October 1,
2004,
ARSC systems were designated asopen research systems.
It is our hope that this new access policy will be beneficial
for all kinds of ARSC users.
As an open research system center, ARSC is the first of
this kind at the Department of Defense's High Performance
Computing Modernization Program (DoD HPCMP) since the program
adopted uniform access policies. We agreed to participate
as a prototype open research system center to help determine
if this type of access policy will work well for users,
and to help the program get a feel for how much demand
is present for such access.
Open systems does not mean that ARSC's basic security
posture has changed. The center is still dedicated to ensuring
that its systems and your data are safe, protected and
properly used. What open research systems does mean is
that users will no longer have to go through an extended
wait to obtain a National Agency Check (NAC) in order to
gain access to our systems. Undergraduate and graduate
students will be able to more easily obtain accounts, giving
them better access during semester-based courses, and allowing
faculty better access to use the systems for classes. It
also means that foreign nationals will be able to more
easily use our resources, opening the door to many post-graduate
students who already work with our current users but whose
work has been delayed while waiting for their NAC to be
returned. All applicants will be required to report their
country of origin and provide proof of their citizenship,
no matter the country, in order to obtain an account.
Already, we have received a positive response to this
change. I am pleased with the way open research systems
will allow us to serve more scientists, spurring more research
and facilitating discovery. This is really our goal in
operating the center, and where we see our success to be.
We look forward to having more opportunities to serve all
of our users with access to our state-of-the-art high performance
computing resources. [Back to Top]
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ARSC User Consultant,
Don Bahls, explores a fly-by of Alaska's Tanana
Valley in the Discovery Lab. The new image
generator will allow researchers in the lab
a new suite of tools with which to create three-dimensional
models and visualizations.
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Alternative
Image Generator to Come Online
A new set of computational tools arrived at ARSC and will
be made available to users this winter. IBM provided seven
IntellistationPro workstations (dual processor Xeon with
4GB of RAM and local disk), an e345 disk server, high-end
video cards and associated networking and console equipment
for use as an image generator to power the center's Discovery
Lab. The system is named VizDog.
This cluster provides ARSC an outstanding opportunity
to offer a state-of-the-art software environment, to empower
users to adjust the operational environment of the systems,
and to rapidly deploy and evaluate new applications.
VizDog will offer dual-boot functionality to both Windows
and Fedora Linux. This will offer access to an incredible
array of software development. Between the two operating
systems, nearly every new software product for interactive
visualization, graphics, rendering and audio can now be
made available to ARSC users.
Igie, the center's SGI Onyx 3200 located in the Butrovich
Computer Facility, will remain the production image generator
for the Discovery Lab. VizDog is currently being installed
in the Rasmuson library near the Discovery lab and will
undergo user testing over the next several months. [Back
to Top]
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ARSC Director,
Frank Williams, looks on as the T3E is delivered
in 1997. The system was retired seven years
later in September of 2004.
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Center Retires
Old Big Irons
Over the past several months, ARSC has been undergoing
significant changes to the center that include retirement
of three supercomputers. The systems, which were replaced
by a Cray X1 and an IBM p690+/p655+ Federation2 system,
included the center's IBM SP, Icehawk; Cray SV1ex, Chilkoot;
and Cray T3E, Yukon.
Yukon, the 272-processor T3E was ARSC's workhorse for
an impressive seven years. The system was maximally utilized
to the end. Yukon supported a wide range of applications
at the center, including ocean modeling, global climate
studies, tsunami modeling and galaxy simulations. ARSC's
T3E was the third supercomputer at the center, which has
supported eight supercomputers in all.
Chilkoot, a 32-CPU SV1ex, was, early in its life, binary
compatible with systems all the way back to the Y-MP. It
kept vector processing alive and well at ARSC until the
introduction of the X1, Klondike, Cray’s scalable
vector system, which is the upgrade for both the T3E and
SV1ex.
The IBM SP, Icehawk, was ARSC's first IBM supercomputer.
At 270 GFLOPS, it briefly became the center's fastest computer.
The SP was replaced by the p690+/p655+ IBM system, Iceberg,
which is currently the center's largest supercomputer.
In addition to Iceberg and Klondike, ARSC is continuing
to support its IBM Regatta supercomputer, which was recently
upgraded to include a new IBM p650 front-end with 8 1.5
GHz processors. The remaining 32 processors in the system
were upgraded to 1.7 GHz, along with an upgrade in memory
to 256 GB.
Data that used to be stored in long term storage on Yukon
and Chilkoot will continue to be available via the archive
file system. Introductions to the new computing systems
are available online at www.arsc.edu. Users who need assistance
should contact the ARSC
help desk. [Back to Top]
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| ARSC
Fall Training Schedule |
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10/5
Introduction to ARSC Resources, Kate
Hedstrom
10/12 Using the Storage Systems at ARSC,
Jeff McAllister
10/19 Introduction to Unix, Shawn Houston
10/26 Cray Quickstart, Ed Kornkven
11/02 IBM Quickstart, Kate Hedstrom
*11/9 NO TRAINING SC2004
11/16 Using IDL to Visualize Scientific
Data, Sergei Maurits
11/23 Loadleveler Details, Tom Logan
11/30 UPC WORKSHOP - ALL DAY
12/07 CRAY Performance Analysis Using CrayPAT,
Tom Baring
12/14 AVS/Express Visualization Quickstart,
Roger Edberg
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New Classroom
at ARSC
During Fall 2004, ARSC opened the center's newest classroom
in the West Ridge Research Building. The room will be equipped
with twelve Macintosh PowerBooks, each with a 20" cinema
display, as well as an additional instructor's PowerBook
and cinema display. The lab will be used for various training
events and hands-on seminars held at the center.
The classroom is already being used by ARSC staff to
support the center's fall training courses. This year's
courses have been restructured to better fit the needs
of university staff and researchers by focusing the series
on short hands-on lectures each Tuesday, followed by open
lab times on Thursdays during which an ARSC staff member
will be on hand to work one-on-one with users.
In addition to the regular Fall training, Tarek El Ghazawi,
of George Washington University, and ARSC will be hosting
a workshop on Unified Parallel C (UPC). UPC is a parallel
extension to the American National Standards Institute
(ANSI) C that allows for distributed shared memory programming.
This workshop will be offered the last week in November
as a special section to the ARSC training series.
The new classroom is an integral part of ARSC's goal to
support high-quality training for ARSC users and the UAF
community. For more information visit www.arsc.edu.
[Back to Top]
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