VizWorld.com

The SC09 folks have posted the video of the community visualizations contributed to the conference online, and it shows several examples of some great visualization and research.  Quick run through of the hour long video shows several virtual worlds running in Second Life and ScienceSim, some interesting scientific visualizations, some collaborative and experimental hardware systems, and lots of cutting edge science.

You can download the “reduced resolution” Version here (250MB), or the full-resolution (1GB+) file at their site.

SC09 – SC09 Visualizations.

Science conference, sc09

The new 2.5 TB ioDrive Octal from Fusion-io was recently displayed at Supercomputing 2009 in Portland, Oregon. The ioDrive is a solid-state drive (SSD) that fits into a x16 PCI Express 2.0 slot. The beauty of the using the PCI Express 2.0 slot is that Fusion-io can really obtain great performance. Fusion-io is claiming that their drive can saturate a 16x PCIe 2.0 slot with their new Octal. The Octal can deliver a bandwidth of 6.4 GBytes/sec. It accomplishes this by using 1,600 flash dies. Samsung is the provider of the memory chips, and is also an investor in Fusion-io. With that many chips, one might wonder how Fusion-io handles the inevitable chip failures. To see how they handle that, let’s take a look at a simpler ioDrive.

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Hardware commercial, feature, fusionio, sc09

At the recent Supercomputing2009 Conference in Portland, OR, Intel’s Justin Rattner talked about the Rise of the 3D Internet as a tool for collaboration and presentation of HPC resources in a friendly way to users.  Disguised in the middle of his talk was a few slides about the upcoming Larrabee chipset with a live on-stage demo. He showed the chipset and ran a few demo’s with some help from Pradeep Dubey, and from my notes:

• SGEMM – Using only half the cores of larrabee, 380GFlops.  With all cores enabled:700Gflops
• SPMVM Sparse Matrices – QCD – FEM_CANT – About 8GFlops

In addition, he discusses the “MYO” (Mine-Yours-Ours) memory architecture where there is not the usual separation between CPU Memory & GPU Memory.  Another interesting tidbit was that not once during the entire hour-plus presentation did he refer to Larrabee as a Graphics Chip or GPU, but rather as a Compute Accelerator.  An interesting change in terminology for a company that previously wanted to wipe out NVidia in the graphics space.

The entire talk is now available on Youtube, and I’ve embedded it after the break.

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Hardware intel, larrabee, sc09

How many times have you looked at your motherboard in despair at the meager 2 or 3 PCI express slots? Maybe you’re one of the lucky people with the new Tyan board and have 6 or 8? As more and more power-hungry and io-hungry devices come to market, the PCIe bus is used more and more. Devices Like PCIe SSD disks, high speed networking interconnects, and (of course) GPUs are all fighting fir those precious slots. And, of course, Murphy’s Law dictates that just as your cluster is fully assembled and online, something will need to be upgraded or replaced.

NextIO has an intriguing solution for this common problem, but it’s not one many people have thought of. With their existing N1400-PCM, you can expand your PCIe bus out to an impressive 14 slots, and 24 with their newest product (N2800-ICA). But it doesn’t end there.

The NextIO product feature can be summed up in a few short words: extensibility, virtualization, and hot swap. These aren’t words people typically associate with PCIe devices, but the NextIO solution makes them all possible.

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Hardware feature, nextio, sc09

CAPS Entreprise was at sc09 announcing the latest version of their HMPP compiler toolsuite. If you are not familiar with their product, it is a toolsuite to aid in hybrid GPU/CPU software development. They were nice enough to invite us for a talk and give us a demonstration of their product.

At the heart of HMPP, it is an extension to existing compiler to help with GPU compute code. With the wide variety of compilers (Microsoft, PGI, GNU, Intel), IDE’s (Visual Studio, Eclipse, Emacs) and GPU Languages (CUDA, OpenCL, Streams, Brook) it can be daunting to develop applications that efficiently works across the wide variety of environments.. HMPP aims to make this all much simpler by allowing you to insert simple directives into your code indicating data structures and routines to accelerate.

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Science caps, feature, gpgpu, hmpp, sc09

The San Diego Supercomputer Center drew a standing-room only crowd when they fired up their connection to the Eureka visualization cluster at Argonne to stream the massive visualization of the universe to the show floor.

This visualization of the Universe as it condenses around fluctuations in the density of dark and ordinary matter is a result from a collaboration between Argonne National Laboratory and the San Diego Supercomputer Center/University of California, San Diego. In a demonstration at SC09 visualizations of a 4096^3 data volume was streamed from Eureka, the graphics cluster at Argonne, over ESnet, filing a 10Gb/s network link, to an OptiPortal in the SDSC booth on the exhibit floor.

You can read an audience account of the event at InsideHPC, and technical details at the Argonne website.

via \Futures \Laboratory » Blog Archive » Project StarGate @ SC09.

Science argonne, astronomy, interactive, sc09

One of the big booths on the SC09 floor belonged to Microsoft, who opened the event with the announcement of a new 2nd beta of Windows HPC Server 2008 and a related Cluster Aware version of Excel 2010.

Microsoft has been ridiculed by several old-school HPC types with such jokes as “fastest blue screen” or “crashing at a teraflop”, but their HPC Server business has been making significant inroads in industries like finance, insurance, and the stock exchanges. The main reason is that the Windows server tools mesh nicely with their existing windows based systems (Excel, sharepoint, SqlServer, etc).  The newest version of HPC Server adds a few new features that might bring it into a more widespread audience with classical HPC.

The new version boasts a much improved MPI implementation, integrated at the OS level, bringing the performance of their product up to identical levels provided by Linux Solutions for heavily distributed benchmarks like Spec. In addition, they have implemented their own job queueing and control system that works with various other Microsoft products to allow multiple users access to the cluster with a minimum of fuss.

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Science feature, microsoft, sc09

NVidia has posted an interview with Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) Researcher Pat McCormick where he discusses the use of NVidia GPU’s and SCOUT to render data from their simulations.

In his research, McCormick is using a language called SCOUT that uses NVIDIA GPUs to help speed data analysis. “When using GPUs, rendering and data analysis goes directly through the GPU. The combination of using SCOUT and processing directly on the GPU saves us the time of writing separate programs as is traditionally required. This speeds up the process of data analysis to almost real time—saving time in both processing and analysis. ”

via nTersect Blog – NVIDIA.

Hardware, Science interview, lanl, nvidia, sc09

In case you do not know, Fermi is the code name for the next generation GPU from Nvidia. The Fermi chip consists of 3 Billion transistors and is manufactured at TSMC on a 40 nm process. By way of comparison, the previous generation of NVidia graphics cards was the GeForce 200 series. The GeForce 200 series consists of 1.4 billion transistors and is built on a 65nm process. Once can easily see that Fermi is more than twice the number of transistors of the previous generation.

Read the rest of Paul’s story after the break, including pictures and video of the elusive Fermi in action.

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Hardware, Science cuda, feature, fermi, nvidia, sc09

Intel CTO Justin Rattner’s opening address at SC09 this morning was entertaining, although it left many people wondering what it really had to do with traditional HPC, and came off a little more “infomercial” than educational.  Comments like this didn’t help:

In tests that Intel has done in the labs, it has demonstrated that the computing requirements needed to simulate worlds takes on a log scale as users are added, their interactions increase, and the realism of the simulations increases. “It is an n2 relationship, and n2 problems always warm the cockles of my heart because n2 means revenue.”

The thrust of his talk was that HPC is stagnating as it stands right now, and the “3D Web” could be a way to reinvigorate the market, foster new hardware acquisitions, and make it more accessible to users worldwide.  The Register has a great writeup of it if you missed the stream.

via Intel: 3D Web to save HPC • The Register.

Hardware, Science hpc, intel, sc09