[Beowulf] just to stir the pot a bit more<grin>

[Bill Bryce]

Hi Jim, 

I didn't know about this integration with Sonnet's software and I work
for Platform Computing...anyhow a lot of companies in the Electronics
space already have LSF so they usually don't buy more licenses - they
just re-purpose them.

And.....marketing owns the website.....that's all I'll say about it :-)

Bill.


-----Original Message-----
From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org]
On Behalf Of Jim Lux
Sent: Monday, November 28, 2005 1:57 PM
To: beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: [Beowulf] just to stir the pot a bit more<grin>

So, in my mailbox this morning was the latest issue of "Microwaves and
RF" 
with an article:
"Cluster Computers speed EM simulation" describing how Sonnet Software
has 
clusterized their EM analysis tools, using the user interface on client,

number crunching on cluster backend model.
http://www.mwrf.com/Articles/ArticleID/11466/11466.html

this is a good example of a task that is easy to partition, since the 
calculations for each frequency point are essentially independent of the

others, so once you've built the model, you can easily farm it out to
all 
the processors.

AND, it's a capability that is exceedingly useful to RF designers, who
are 
always trading off wall clock time against the number of frequencies
you've 
analyzed the circuit at, hoping you didn't miss some horrible resonance
or 
interaction.

They use LSF from PlatformComputing http://www.platform.com/ as their 
cluster/grid/NoW manager


here's Sonnet's page
http://www.sonnetsoftware.com/products/em/ef_emcluster.asp

the pricing model is a bit punitive, IMHO, since they require a separate

license of the top of the line software (Sonnet Pro) for EACH node (they

don't quote a price on the website, but the tier BELOW the Pro (Level 3 
Gold) is $12K)..

Seems that all the stuff in the article about how cheap each node can be
is 
sort of pointless, when you're going to be installing software that
costs, 
easily, 4x the hardware cost.

No data on what the LSF component from Platform might cost (the Platform

website is very flashy, but relatively content free, unless you like 
reading press releases)


However, it also appears that the backend could be Linux and the front
end 
client could be Windows, since Sonnet runs on all of them.  (or, just to

get rgb cranked up... the single client could be Linux, and the 
computational back end could some horrible mix of Apple, Unix, and
Windows 
machines, perhaps of different versions!)



James Lux, P.E.
Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group
Flight Communications Systems Section
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena CA 91109
tel: (818)354-2075
fax: (818)393-6875


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