Dell HPC Blogs The Dell HPC blogs have lots of in-depth material related to high performance computing with tons of good information. These are not to be missed. Dell HPC Blog Main Page Featured Blogs: Blake Gonzales Dell HPC Scientist Dr. Mark Fernandez, Ph.D. Dell Computer Scientist, Advanced Systems Group 02-01-2010 -- Architecting HPC Systems for Fault Tolerance and Reliability: Part 2 - Clustered Systems Within the last decade, clustered architectures have become the predominate design for new HPC systems. This has been in response to several factors, including the ability to utilize commodity hardware. SMP systems were mostly proprietary architectures that changed from vendor to vendor. There are many reasons for the migration to clustered systems, but we will mainly address only the fault tolerance aspects here. Link to blog post 01-28-2010 -- Overcoming the Fear, Costs & Support Commitment of PetaFLOPS Systems In a previous blog, we discussed the coming of PetaFLOPS to the masses. In general, increased compute power at affordable prices is continuing to arrive each day. Along that path to increased compute power, there are a few bumps that need addressing. One is storage and the required I/O rates. Link to blog Latest Blogs: 02-01-2010 -- Architecting HPC Systems for Fault Tolerance and Reliability: Part 2 - Clustered Systems 01-28-2010 -- Overcoming the Fear, Costs & Support Commitment of PetaFLOPS Systems 01-22-2010 -- PetaFLOPS for the Common Man (Introduction) 01-19-2010 -- Architecting HPC Systems for Fault Tolerance and Reliability: Part 1 SMP Systems 01-13-2010 -- The Next Decade Will Intertwine Most Science & Engineering Research with Supercomputing 01-11-2010 - Architecting HPC Systems for Fault Tolerance and Reliability (Introduction) 11-12-2009 - SC09's Bio-computing Focus 10-26-2009 -- HPC: the next 20 years 10-9-2009 -- Impact of C1E on PowerEdge 11G Servers 9-8-2009 -- iSCSI for HPC 8-26-2009 -- HPC in Paradise Most Popular Blogs: 10-9-2009 -- Impact of C1E on PowerEdge 11G Servers 9-8-2009 -- iSCSI for HPC 8-24-2009 -- BIOS Optimization for HPC on 11G 4-08-2009 - Nehalem and Memory Configurations HPC Links Here are a number of links to help you with your HPC technical quest: Dell / HPC November 2009 Top 500 List HPC Overview - Podcast Here are some useful links for HPC-related news sites, blogs, and otherwise useful URLs: HPCWire (Best general site for HPC news and information) InsideHPC (Good site for HPC news) Clustermonkey (Great site for general cluster articles - Dell's own Jeff Layton is one of the authors at this site) Scalability (The best HPC blog on the Web from Joe Landman) HPCCommunity (Good site to talk about LSF, OCS 5.x, and Kusu) You can stay connected with HPC at Dell on Twitter - follow us @HPCatDell.

HPC Overview High Performance Computing (HPC) is a term most commonly associated with the ecosystem of hardware, software, and middleware used to conduct computationally intensive research across distributed memory computer systems. Specialized hardware and software binds many commodity servers together so their aggregate computing power is equal to that of the most powerful. Dell HPC clusters help solve some of the most challenging computationally intensive tasks facing business, educational, and scientific communities. By integrating the latest advances in industry-standard servers, high-speed interconnects, and leading open source and commercial software, Dell's HPC clusters deliver the performance of proprietary SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) systems with the simplicity and value of industry-standard computing. HPC at Dell Multimedia Center Technical videos, podcasts and videos featuring Dell HPC customers Feature: HPC & Visualization at TACC Video features Texas Advanced Computing Center featuring some of it cluster technology and visualization capabilities. Feature: Penn State University How Penn State University uses HPC & Visualization for Student and Industrial Research Dell HPC: Enabling Discovery. HPC Visualization at Dell customer sites, featuring Florida State University, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), and Penn State University. Supercomputing and Dell The annual Supercomputer Conference in early November is always a big highlight for the community (plus it's a chance to get some exercise before Thanksgiving Turkey puts us to sleep). The conference moves from place to place every year so be sure to visit the link below to read about what Dell is doing at this year's conference and what Dell has done in past conferences. Supercomputing and Dell Introduction to HPC Some people are very familiar with HPC, but those who aren't or who want to learn more can follow the link below for an introduction to HPC. The article starts with a brief introduction to HPC but also includes links to resources that discuss various aspects of HPC. Please be sure to follow the links in the article, but come back to this page for more information. Introduction to HPC

Power and Cooling

Data Center Power and Cooling is another important topic in HPC solutions, because a large number of densely populated servers in a data center can generate a lot of heat and consume a lot of power. HPC solutions tend to be at the extreme end of the range of high density and high performance, which makes an efficient power and cooling design a key component.

HPC Software

Once all of the hardware for a Dell HPC cluster is purchased, deployed, and configured, the next obvious step is deciding "What software do I need to run on the cluster?" There are two software components that are always needed:

Applications - Ultimately, this is why the cluster was purchased in the first place. Typically, during deployment and overall cluster qualification, application benchmarks are run to ensure the cluster will meet the customer's needs.

Operating System - Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Microsoft Windows CCS. Applications really influence the choice of operating system. If the application runs on Microsoft Windows but not on Linux then the operating system choice is obvious.

Once the applications and operating system are chosen, there are many other software components required for an operational cluster and all of these components form the Software Stack. Dell HPC has a nice diagram on the Dell HPC Web site that shows a high-level HPC software stack.

The Dell HPC diagram is just an example software stack; other organizations have their own definition of a software stack but in general you need the following layers (in no particular order):

• Basic cluster services
• Cluster provisioning
• Cluster management
• Cluster monitoring
• Cluster events & logging
• Workload management
• Cluster reporting
• Cluster file system and/or parallel file system
• Patching & repository management
• Development tools
• Tools and libraries for parallel programming
• Application and/or grid portals

As you can see, these are a lot of components to install and configure. Fortunately, there is movement in the industry to standardize some of the components in the software stack to make it much easier. Intel, Dell, and other partners such as Platform Computing, Ansys, CD-Adapco, The Mathworks, and others are working together on Intel Cluster Ready.

The Intel site has this description of Intel Cluster Ready:

The Intel® Cluster Ready program and technology package makes it easier to design, build, sell, program, acquire, and deploy clusters built with Intel components. In collaboration with OEMs, channel members, and ISVs, the program specifies a common basis for clusters. This ensures ISV applications written to run on one certified cluster can reliably run on another certified cluster; conversely, a certified cluster will support multiple Intel® Cluster Ready ISV applications.