[Beowulf] Roadrunner shutdown

Dmitri Chubarov dmitri.chubarov at gmail.com
Thu Apr 4 19:51:08 PDT 2013


A general idea of the kind of applications that run on Roadrunner can be
seen in the SC'08 Initial report. The application described there is a
neutron-transport model. The kind of the communication pattern seen in this
application is described as a wavefront. For the Roadrunner it was ported
from a pure MPI implementation. On Roadrunner the Opterons are used for
communication and the compute intensive part is ported on to the PowerXCell.

http://www.c3.lanl.gov/pal/publications/papers/barker08:SC08_Roadrunner.pdf


On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 9:18 AM, Vincent Diepeveen <diep at xs4all.nl> wrote:

> 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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