- Posts tagged hpc
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HPCwire: Python Snakes Its Way Into HPC
Interpreted programming languages usually don't find too many friends in high performance computing. Yet Python, one of the most popular general-purpose interpreted languages, has garnered a small community of enthusiastic followers. True believers got the opportunity to hear about the language in the HPC realm in a tutorial session on Monday and a BoF session on Wednesday.
I'm not at SC10 this year, but I am actually giving a seminar today on HPC with Python. That aside, I'm a bit bummed I missed this BoF. For our astro work, we use Python extensively for analysis, and the paper that was up on the arXiv yesterday was in fact all about this.
It's worth noting that David Beazley, the author of SWIG and a luminary in the Python community, has been involved with Python for HPC applications since sometime in the mid 90's. Python for HPC is not new!
Is China a supercomputer threat? (Q&A) | Nanotech - The Circuits Blog - CNET News
The ecosystem tends to get out of balance because the hardware tends to run far ahead of what we can develop in terms of software. We have machines that have a tremendous level of parallelism. We currently have a very crude way of doing programming.
Click the link for more -- it's a Q&A with Jack Dongarra about Tianhe-1A, the new 2.5 [sustained] PF machine in China. Other interesting bits are that the interconnect is home grown and roughly twice the bandwidth of Infiniband.
HPCwire: Computational Chemistry Package NWChem Goes Open Source
NWChem, the premier computational chemistry package developed at the Department of Energy's EMSL, is going open source -- allowing computer scientists worldwide to contribute to its future development and opening its use to more researchers and students.
Good news.
HPCwire: NCSA Receives NSF Grant to Develop Eclipse-Based Workbench for HPC Applications
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will lead a team that has been awarded a three-year grant of $1.4 million from the National Science Foundation to develop a better way to manage the development of complex science and engineering codes.
I've used Eclipse before, mainly when playing with Android development, and I found it far more usable than I expected. I'm kind of a die-hard vim user, but I would consider using an HPC-focused workstation like Eclipse for some integrated tasks. This could be very cool!
HPCwire: NSF Awards SDSC $2.8 Million for Trestles Supercomputer
However, a fair number of computational science approaches require resources with scheduling flexibility and rapid turnaround. "By focusing on core counts of 1,024 or less, Trestles is designed to serve a much larger number of users while simultaneously improving their productivity as measured by turnaround and the number of jobs completed," said Allan Snavely, associate director of SDSC and also a co-PI for the new system.
Meso-scale computing. Rad.
Texas Advanced Computing Center: Supercomputing: There’s an App for That
The team performed a series of expensive high-fidelity simulations on the Ranger supercomputer to generate a small “reduced model” which was transferred to a Google Android smart phone. They were then able to solve problems on the phone and visualize the results on the fly.
New Data Silos at SLAC
To cope with SLAC's vast arsenal of facts and figures, the computing department houses six data silos containing collectively around twenty-two thousand 200-gigabyte tapes, and around five thousand 20-gigabyte tapes. Though they are slower than disks, tapes are better for long term archival of data and more durable. Now, the six tape-based data silos are being replaced with newer, more compact storage structures.
Wow, I had no idea there was so much data stored at SLAC... even so, the storage challenges of future scientific projects taking place at SLAC would vastly exceed this capacity.
Researchers race to produce 3D models of BP oil spill - Computerworld
The project is getting a "high priority," said Clint Dawson, professors of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas, and one of the researchers. "What our model can do that a lot of the other models can't do is actually track the oil spill up into marshes and the wetlands because we have fine scale resolution in those areas - that's our main concern.
An emergency allocation of one million SU on Ranger for simulating the Oil Spill.
Manage cloud storage from the command line with GSUtil - Google Open Source Blog
GSUtil is a command-line tool that helps developers manage their cloud storage. The tool makes it very easy to explore various features of Google Storage for Developers - in just a few minutes, you can learn how to create a storage bucket, upload objects, and set access controls.
Very cool. 100GB storage for free, 300GB per month bandwidth. Add on a native HDF5-transport layer and I'm sold!
MPI-Mapreduce
This is the home page for the MapReduce-MPI (MR-MPI) library, which is an open-source implementation of MapReduce written for distributed-memory parallel machines on top of standard MPI message passing.
Uses ctypes for the Python interface.
