HPC 2014-15 | Soſtware tools
‘We are rolling out and will be demonstrating a whole new power management framework, and set of capabilities.’ Operators will be able to look at the status of the system and see how the power increases in the same way that they can see the CPU time increase, while the jobs are running. ‘In any sort of science, you need to be able to measure,’ Nitzberg said, ‘and we’re rolling out the tools to be able to measure power usage. When people see what they are using, they will change their behaviour.’ It’s moving along the road to treating power and energy as a resource, he said: ‘You could even start charging people based on their power usage.’ Just as Jill King stressed the innovation
within Moab 8.0 for Adaptive Computing, so Nitzberg said that version 13 of PBS Professional, currently in beta testing and due for release in the first quarter of 2015: ‘is probably one of our biggest releases’. While the original focus on the Exascale front – providing new ways to deal with scalability, reliability, and performance – has been retained, in the course of the soſtware’s development, its reach has been extended to embrace power management, usability, and improvements to the Windows version. All those extra nodes and cores that
are being added as HPC moves down the road towards Exascale is a challenge that this version of the soſtware is addressing, according to Nitzberg. ‘We are targeting more than 100,000 nodes, so millions of cores; hundreds of jobs a second throughput – that’s millions of jobs a day.’ Altair has replaced PBS Professional’s current communications system with a new, more modern, tree- based connection fabric that will foster fully-multithreaded, fully non-blocking communication between those parts of the soſtware that need to talk to each other. As HPC machines become ever larger
and more complex, there will always be some components that fail, so ‘We have put in a lot of additional node health-check infrastructure,’ Nitzberg continued. But sometimes nodes may have failed without this being detected until a very large job is started and the job then aborts prematurely. However, ‘with some of the non-blocking stuff, we’re also targeting the ability to start up very large jobs – half the size of the system or larger – first time, despite finding failures we did not know about.’ To achieve this, the protocol in PBS Professional for how jobs start has been changed so that very large jobs can start again using different nodes. ‘It’s a fantastic release that we have architected
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for Exascale,’ he said. ‘As we scale up to 100 Petaflop, I think we’re in great shape. Going a further factor of 10, I don’t know what I’m going to find.’ Getting the message out about the
importance of a piece of infrastructure soſtware such as PBS Professional can be complicated. Nitzberg said: ‘Where our value is, is that we make the lives of end-users more productive, more natural, easier, and more friendly. To tell that value story, we
running simulations, performing large-scale computations, and have a work flow of pre- processing data staging, batch processing.’ But, he went on, while the soſtware was providing a way to run simulations, it was also ‘providing to system administrators and project managers a unified interface to see how the projects are running; how the resources are used; and how to provision new resources seamlessly – with the capability of managing large scale multisite infrastructure, that could gather a classical HPC cluster, a supercomputer or even a cloud platform.’ Tere are two elements to the SysFera-DS
package, Loureiro explained. ‘Trough the web-based interface, users can submit jobs, manage their data, manage projects, get some monitoring and reporting, visualise their data remotely: All the web-based solution is proprietary,’ he said. ‘But you may need to manage other resources and to manage all this heterogeneity, we do provide, within SysFera- DS, soſtware called Vishnu, which is open source. Tis middleware is here to abstract all the complexity.’ Customers feel that buying new HPC
“We are not helping people to parallelise an application; we are helping them to be the most efficient they can with their existing infrastructure”
need to tell the end-users, but they’re not the ones installing the soſtware. It’s not end- user desktop soſtware, so we really end up talking the system-administration teams, the system managers, and then a lot of times to the engineering managers – the folks whose teams they want to make more productive.’
End users and system administrators David Loureiro, CEO of the French soſtware company SysFera, also sees both communities as beneficiaries of his soſtware tools: SysFera- DS provides ease of use for end-users, but also information for project managers and IT administrators. For companies that are running a large number of simulations and where R&D is important: ‘We are providing a way of getting rid of all the complexities of technical computing, because those people are engineers and scientists, not IT specialists or computer scientists,’ he said. Trough a web-based interface, SysFera-DS can provide ‘all the things that people want, who are
resources implies that the end-user will have to learn a new way to access resources and, he said, that is putting a lot of pressure on administrators, because they have to standardise how to use applications. ‘We are providing through our soſtware a way to do this, so they can concentrate instead on the core business, and so the set-up time is really short when new resources are put into production.’ Ultimately, Loureiro envisages removing
the complexities for end-user scientists and engineers so as to create ‘an HPC desktop’ for them. He pointed to initiatives, both in France and internationally, to integrate ‘the HPC way of doing things’ with the work of the independent application-soſtware vendors, to remove the mystique from HPC and thus widen its uptake among end-user scientists and engineers – providing HPC as a service and helping the end-user to concentrate on their core business. ‘We are not helping people to parallelise an application; we are helping them to be the most efficient they can with their existing infrastructure. People have to take time setting things up rather than using them.’ Loureiro concluded: ‘Te problem we
are trying to solve is that the users have applications, but it is really hard to run them on the right machine at the right time. Tey need something that will allow them to concentrate on what they really want to do.’ l
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