Intel Investors - NCSA designs a 256 PentiumII Supercluster
For those Windows NT fans who can't get by with standard 4-Way PentiumII Servers, here's a "bigger option" .
Paul
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newsalert.com
NCSA Creates World's Largest LSF-based Parallel
Windows NT Cluster; New Windows NT Supercluster
Makes High-Performance Computing More Affordable
PR Newswire - August 10, 1998 16:58
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TORONTO, Aug. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has used Platform's LSF Suite to create
the world's largest LSF-based parallel Windows NT cluster, delivering High Performance Computing (HPC) from commodity Intel- based PCs and workstations.
NCSA and researchers with the Alliance Parallel Computing Team constructed the Window NT "supercluster" from commercial PCs as part of its research into commodity HPC. NCSA, the leading-edge site for the National Computational Science Alliance, completed construction of a 256-processor Windows NT supercluster consisting of 128 dual-processor Pentium II workstations. That supercluster will be upgraded to 512 processors within the next year.
"LSF is a crucial component of our NT supercluster," said Larry Smarr, director of NCSA and the Alliance. "It is our queuing and scheduling system for jobs on the supercluster, and we are pushing its use to new heights running distributed jobs."
LSF provides distributed load sharing and job scheduling for heterogeneous UNIX and Windows NT computing environments. LSF enables users to take full advantage of the combined resources of the entire supercluster for parallel applications that can scale up to the full cluster. LSF has clearly demonstrated its usefulness in a large-scale NT environment with parallel applications, accelerating the migration of mission-critical applications from UNIX clusters to heterogeneous
UNIX and Windows NT environments.
The supercluster supports the Message Passing Interface (MPI) enabling parallel production applications to be easily integrated with the LSF Suite. MPI is an industry standard that has been used successfully for astrophysics, environmental hydrology, finite element analysis and numerical relativity applications that have previously been run on NCSA's SGI/Cray Origin2000 or Hewlett-Packard SPP-2000 systems.
The supercluster uses software called High Performance Virtual Machine (HPVM), which integrates clusters of Windows NT processors into a high- performance environment. HPVM, developed by Andrew Chien, a professor in the University of Illinois Department of Computer
Science and a member of the Parallel Computing Team, enables each node of an NT cluster to communicate at a bandwidth of just under 80 megabytes per second and at a latency of less than 11 microseconds. As a result, it will offer users in the national scientific community a low-cost alternative to conventional high-performance machines that are typically used to carry out high-end computational research.
"We didn't see any point in duplicating the effort of a successful commercial product," said Chien. "With a modest effort, we integrated LSF with our HPVM software, and it provides full monitoring
and scheduling functions for our cluster."
This new initiative further extends Platform's LSF presence at NSCA as it gains widespread acceptance and provides the potential for cross-platform coordination. LSF is also being used for job scheduling on NCSA's Origin2000 and on its SGI POWER CHALLENGEarray
supercomputers.
"Platform Computing is proud to be a part of the groundbreaking work that is going on NCSA," said Dave Black, President and CEO of Platform Computing. "High-performance Windows NT clusters are ushering in a new era of affordable high performance computing, which is being
enabled by our LSF Suite of tools for Workload Management. Platform is excited to bring to the NT environment the first truly reliable, scalable, and fault tolerant solution for high- performance
computing."
About NCSA
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the leading-edge site for the National
Computational Science Alliance. NCSA is a leader in the development and deployment of
cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking, and information technologies. NCSA is
funded by National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, industrial
partners, and other federal agencies.
The National Computational Science Alliance is a partnership to prototype an advanced
computational infrastructure for the 21st Century and includes more than 50 academic, government
and industry research partners from across the United States. The Alliance receives core funding
from the National Science Foundation and cost-sharing at partner institutions.
About Platform
Platform Computing Corporation is the world leader in workload management. Founded in 1992
and headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with offices in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific,
Platform's LSF Suite enables enterprise customers to manage and support business-critical
workloads in distributed heterogeneous computing environments.
The LSF Suite is used in more than 60,000 computers in more than 600 major corporations
worldwide. It has been embraced as the industry standard for workload management by major
system vendors such as Sun, HP, Compaq, Silicon Graphics, Digital, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, and
Sony, who bundle, distribute and co-market LSF Suite to their customers. For more information
visit Platform's web site at www.platform.com.
SOURCE Platform Computing Corporation
/CONTACT: Albert Behr of Platform Computing Corporation, 416-512-9587,
ext. 374, or fax, 416-512-8976, or albertb@platform.com/
/Web site: platform.com |
