HPC PROJECTS: VISUALISATION
➤
working with academics around the world, both through Microsoft Research and through the business group, and it’s great to see such rapid adoption of our technology. There are new and interesting things happening every day.’
Working together
Many HPC vendors attending the Supercomputing (SC) and International Supercomputing (ISC) exhibitions bring some demonstration machines along with them. So much computing power under one roof allows attendees to experience HPC visualisation for themselves. Mellanox builds the SciNet demonstration cluster annually at SC, and the ISCNet at ISC. The clusters are based on the combined HPC capacity of 20-25 different organisations that are exhibiting at the show, with each stand’s hardware added to the cluster via an InfiniBand 120Gb/s network. Gilad Shainer, director of HPC and technical marketing at Mellanox Technologies, describes SciNet at SC’09: ‘Every time we do this, we try to bring something that has a lot of visualisation in the demonstration – it should be fun to see the demonstration,
rather than just being about the technology.’ Shainer explains that the cluster was organised in two parts: ‘One server in every location served as a visualisation node, which rendered data and put it on a screen. The rest of the servers worked as a [single] rendering farm, rendering the application before sending the data to the visualisation nodes. Each of the servers was loaded with GPUs,’ he says, adding that due to the heterogeneity of the servers involved, the
‘It should be fun to see the demonstration, rather than just being about the technology’
cluster included both Nvidia and ATI GPUs. ‘This may be the first time that a mix of ATI and Nvidia hardware has been used for a single application,’ says Shainer. The demonstration at SC’09 was an immersive 3D visualisation of a car, based on models supplied by Peugeot. Observers were able to move around the car, and the image would adjust accordingly based on sensors attached to the 3D glasses used. Shainer
DEISA PRACE Symposium 2010 in Barcelona:
Exciting Computational Science and Future HPC Technologies
Photo: Pau Giralt / by courtesy of Obra Social de Caixa Catalunya archives
DEISA, the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications, and PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe will organise a second major European event in High Performance Computing: the DEISA PRACE Symposium 2010. The symposium “Advancements in PetaFlop-Computing” will take place from May 10 to May 12 in Barcelona, Spain. The symposium covers both European and international developments. The event is of major interest to a broad audience: computational scientists, HPC technology experts, government representatives, vendors, and industry partners.
On the first day keynote speakers across the world will
For more information visit:
www.deisa.eu/news_press/symposium/barcelona2010/deisa-symposium-barcelona-may-10-12-2010 www.prace-project.eu/events/registration
outline the strategic perspectives of High Performance Computing.
The second and third day focus on challenges in computational science. Speakers from PRACE will address future technologies including novel programming paradigms, tools, Tier-0 systems access, and emerging technologies. DEISA and PRACE will provide updates on Extreme Computing in Europe, HPC architectures, applications, and training. In three Extreme Computing sessions, challenging computational science projects from all over Europe will be presented, covering essential scientific areas.
Registration for the DEISA PRACE Symposium is open at the DEISA and the PRACE websites, free of charge.
states that the 120Gb/s InfiniBand (the first time, globally, that the technology has been pushed to this speed) was necessary in order to reduce latency to the point that there was no noticeable delay between an observer moving his or her head and the 3D image being updated accordingly. Mellanox is already planning the demonstration for the ISC’10 exhibition, to be held in Hamburg, Germany. An Egyptian pyramid will be modelled, as it was when it was first built. ‘We bring the same impressive visualisations to the show floor, and we’ll be using 120Gb/s InfiniBand again, but we’ll also demonstrate a new technology that Mellanox is working on with Nvidia, called GPU Direct. It’s a development to reduce the GPU-to-GPU communication overheads. Currently, communication between GPUs (in a rendering farm for example) requires CPU cycles, even though InfiniBand is used to connect servers. The CPU currently has to be between the GPU and the InfiniBand during GPU communication. Nvidia has managed to take the CPU out of the loop, and reduced 30 per cent of the communication time, more or less.’
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44