[Beowulf] Roadrunner shutdown

Vincent Diepeveen diep at xs4all.nl
Thu Apr 4 19:18:27 PDT 2013


Note that as for nuke explosions i have no idea how those look like -  
maybe someone more knowledgeable wants to comment on that.

As a total layman there i would suspect that it's important where the  
protons/neutrons/whatever-tons/supertiny-tons are located. I'd be  
modelling that naively using
matrixcalculations.

So that would mean the only low level library you need is a  
matrixcalculation and some relative simple functions - with the  
matrixcalculations
  eating 99% of all system time on that massive supercomputer out of  
all calculations done on it.

In such case one would need surprisingly little very well optimized  
code to make optimal usage out of such massive supercomputer.

Any other 'secret' batchjob i'd be running on a different  
supercomputer. If there is no need to run a massive vector oriented  
workload type matrixcalculation -
one just shouldn't run on such type of supercomputer i feel. NASA  
still had that 10240 socket supercomputer back then if i remember well,
to give one example...



On Apr 4, 2013, at 5:39 PM, Max R. Dechantsreiter wrote:

> Vincent,
>
>> It doesn't matter whether you code for blue gene, cuda or phi - from
>> a software viewpoint it's all vector type coding you've got to do.
>> the price of 1 coder is total peanuts compared to
>> the price of those supercomputers. So specialistic written software
>> is what you need anyway.
>
> Simply porting an application shouldn't take much effort,
> as long as vendor-specific libraries aren't involved.
> However, special and sometimes intensive efforts are often
> required to achieve good performance (high utilization).
>
> The unfortunate fact is that funds are more easily spent
> on hardware than on the human resources needed to utilize
> them effectively.
>
> Max
> ---
> http://www.linkedin.in/in/benchmarking




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