Cluster Connection » Maria McLaughlin

Introducing - SEISMIC COVERAGE VALIDATION ENGINE

Maria McLaughlin — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 22:36:59 +0000

LANDMARK AND APPRO INTRODUCE SEISMIC COVERAGE VALIDATION ENGINE FOR OIL AND GAS EXPLORATION DATA PROCESSING

WHO: Halliburton's (NYSE: HAL) Landmark and Software Services business line, premier provider of software and technology for the upstream oil and gas industry, and Appro, a leading provider of supercomputing solutions, and Intel, a world leader in computing innovation

WHAT: Announce the launch of an Appro pre-configured Intel® Cluster Ready certified supercomputing solution that is pre-tested to run Landmark's new Seismic Coverage Validation Tools. The wave equation-based Illumination and Visibility software helps geoscientists design 3D seismic surveys and select processing parameters optimized for geologic targets in traditionally poorly imaged areas. The software runs on a pre-configured Appro GreenBlade™ System based on Intel® Xeon® processors featuring dual socket, 32 nodes with up to 12 CPU cores per node and 8GB of memory. The result provides geoscientists with an Intel® Cluster Ready solution that is easy to deploy and maintain "out of the box."

WHEN: Demonstrations will occur at the SEG International Exposition October 17 – 20 in Denver, CO.

WHERE: Appro booth #1116, Halliburton booth #1611, and Intel booth #2562.

WHY: Complex subsurface environments, like deepwater and subsalt, present many challenges to seismic acquisition design and imaging, including azimuthal orientation, image shadows and amplitude variations in the data which can lead to incorrect interpretations and reservoir models. Landmark's Illumination and Visibility technology analyze and model the seismic signal from source, to subsurface target, to receiver so that the geophysicist can optimize imaging parameters to a specific subsurface target or make the required design changes to future seismic acquisition surveys. These accurate wave equation-based techniques are compute intensive, requiring the high performance computing from Appro's cluster deployment. This architecture, optimized to run Landmark's Seismic Coverage Validation tools, will provide faster results so geoscientists can make improved and more timely exploration decisions while lowering overall exploration costs.

For more information please visit www.halliburton.com.

About Appro
Appro is a leading developer of supercomputing solutions. Appro is uniquely positioned to support High Performance Computing markets focusing on small, medium to large-scale deployments where lower total cost of ownership is essential. Appro accelerates technical data-intensive applications for faster business results through outstanding price/performance, balanced architecture coupled with latest technologies, open standards and engineering expertise. Appro headquarters is in Milpitas, CA with offices in Korea and Houston, TX.

To learn more go to www.appro.com.

About Landmark
Landmark is the premier provider of software and technology services for the upstream oil and gas industry. Our software solutions, built for the DecisionSpace® environment, help improve insight from data in ways never possible before, across the entire exploration and production life cycle. Landmark's technology deployment and hosting services, petrotechnical computing portfolio, software training, and certified customer support are globally available to help our customers realize the maximum return on their technology investments.

Visit www.halliburton.com/landmark/ for more information.

About Halliburton
Founded in 1919, Halliburton is one of the world's largest providers of products and services to the energy industry. With more than 55,000 employees in approximately 70 countries, the company serves the upstream oil and gas industry throughout the life cycle of the reservoir - from locating hydrocarbons and managing geological data, to drilling and formation evaluation, well construction and completion, and optimizing production through the life of the field.

Visit the company's Web site at www.halliburton.com

Landmark & Appro: Seismic Coverage Validation Engine

Maria McLaughlin — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 21:23:21 +0000

...for Oil and Gas Exploration Data Processing

Landmark's new Seismic Coverage Validation Tools with Appro supercomputing solution, introduced a pre-configured ready to go architecture that is pre-tested, Intel Cluster Ready certified, and ready to run.

The wave equation-based Illumination and Visibility software helps geoscientists design 3D seismic surveys for geologic targets. The result provides geoscientists with an Intel Cluster Ready solution that is easy to deploy and maintain "out of the box."

Read the full Configuration Guide for more details.

Accelerate small to mid-sized ANSYS HPC deployments

Maria McLaughlin — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:07:43 +0000

Appro Ready-to-Go clusters are Intel® Cluster Ready certified, optimized to run ANSYS applications, and pre-tested with the Intel® Cluster Checker software to help ensure application and component interoperability. Power up with the Appro Ready-to-Go Cluster Series.

>> Read the Solution Guide

Blade Systems Make Perfect HPC Cluster Building Block Solution

Maria McLaughlin — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:46:29 +0000

In some sense, blades have always used a more green design. In terms of energy efficiency, the advantage of blades is the ability to use shared power and cooling. The Appro GreenBlade as an example takes full advantage of these features. Each blade contains a dual socket Nehalem motherboard with 8 cores, up to 48 GB of DDR3 1333MHz memory, and an optional 1TB of internal storage. Ten blades fit in 5U chassis for a total of 80 cores, 480 GB of memory, and 10 TB of storage.
By adopting an improved green design, users can expect a 20% overall reduction in power use over previous 1U solutions. Coupled with the power saving capability of the new Intel® micro-architecture, the Appro GreenBlade offers outstanding compute/power efficiency. Power savings are derived from the shared redundant cooling fans and power supplies. The power supplies are high-efficiency (90%+) and configured in a N+1 redundant fashion. Another advantage of bladed systems is the enhanced manageability that 1U solutions cannot offer. Each subrack chassis has a shelf manager that provides power control and staged power-up of all blades. Blades, fans and power supplies can be monitored remotely using standard IPMI/BMC tools.
The system comes in a 5U form factor and holds up to 10 blade nodes in one chassis offering up to 80 processing cores in a computing solution box that can scale as the need for compute capacity expands. By sharing power and cooling in one package, GreenBlade helps HPC users save up-front costs and reduce monthly energy and air-conditioning bills. The Appro GreenBlade system also adds redundancy to each server to prevent unplanned downtime, making it easier to allocate a single spare to protect many servers at once. With its open and modular architecture, it provides the essential elements for building, deploying, maintaining, and upgrading clusters for greater customer flexibility and choice.
In addition, the initial entry price point of the Appro GreenBlade is at price parity with 1U rack-mounted servers, making the crossover point favorable for the GreenBlade system and a better fit for HPC midmarket deployments.
Density and Reliability
A typical 1U solution can hold one or two motherboards. With a single motherboard solution, only 40 cores can be placed in the same 5U space occupied by the Appro GreenBlade System thus requiring additional rack space (and power) to achieve the same core parity. If a dual motherboard solution is used, then the same density can be achieved but at the cost of sharing a single non-redundant power supply for two motherboards. The loss of a power supply or the need to service one of the motherboards requires both motherboards to be out of service. Because the GreenBlades share redundant power supplies, each blade is hot-swappable and can be serviced without affecting any other blade. Eight sub-rack chassis can be housed in a standard 42 rack for a total of 640 cores.

The Intel® Cluster Ready Program enables faster, easier deployment of higher performance HPC clusters based on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series. Intel Cluster Ready makes it simpler to choose, deploy and manage HPC clusters, and ensures application and system interoperability. In doing so, it enables companies to rapidly capitalize on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series and use it to solve bigger problems, expedite total application performance, and reduce TCO. Bottom line: simpler, more powerful and more cost-effective high performance computing. The Intel Cluster Ready certification gives customers another reason to deploy the Appro GreenBlade solution by offering confidence that the cluster architecture and software are certified to work together. It also gives Independent Software Vendors (ISV) the ability to run their software in this certified cluster platform providing a fast and cost-effective implementation for industry-specific solutions.
Not all blades are created equal. In the HPC sector, blades need to be both green and provide high performance. The Appro GreenBlade System provides an extremely flexible and manageable way to create high-density computing. It is designed to scale, with little effort or re-configuration.
The Appro cluster solution based on the GreenBlade building block offers a variety of interconnect options to include only standard 1U Ethernet or 1U Infiniband (IB) switches. This is accomplished by pre-allocating space in each rack cabinet for two standard 24-port Infiniband or Ethernet switches. This offers flexibility for customers who may choose to deploy either an Ethernet or IB-based HPC cluster. Appro also offers variations in the Infiniband interconnect with ConnectX DDR single IB, DDR dual IB or QDR single IB configurations. The Appro GreenBlade is unique in this category; each blade can provide one or two QDR InfiniBand ports on the motherboard and thus do not require any additional PCIe HCAs to be added to the blade. All these options provide excellent network bandwidth and low latency at an affordable price point to many HPC workloads that require higher performance for their applications.
In addition, the Appro GreenBlade offers standards-based Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) with a choice of Appro’s remote server management or open source cluster management software solutions.
Long considered to be primarily useful only for HPC-scale deployments, blades are beginning to make inroads into the midsize HPC segment. With the introduction of blade products designed specifically for the needs of this market, such as the Appro GreenBlade system, midsize HPC customers are more likely to turn to blades for their day-to-day server infrastructure needs. The Appro GreenBlade is suited for small to midsize departmental and workgroup high performance computing data centers looking for flexibility of system configuration and network connectivity. This addresses the need for performance, reliability, floor space, power and cooling limitations, storage and remote management options at an affordable price. In addition, the Appro GreenBlade is ideal for HPC applications that require high bandwidth and low latency access to system memory, clustering, and Storage Area Networks (SAN).

Why Intel® Xeon 5500 Processor Series?

Maria McLaughlin — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:39:18 +0000

The new Intel® Xeon Processors 5500 series is a new micro architecture. The most significant change is a true quad-core design with much improved memory bandwidth. In past Intel designs, all the processor sockets on the motherboard shared the same memory controller. As the core count on the nodes increased, this introduced a possible bottleneck for some applications. The Intel® micro-architecture has now placed a memory controller on each processor and added a high speed processor-to-processor interface (12.8 GB/s unidirectional) called QuickPath. The result is a 3.5 times improvement in memory bandwidth as measured by the stream benchmark using a similarly clocked Harpertown processor. Intel reports that applications like LS-Dyna and Fluent see improvements of 2.02 and 2.2 times (respectively) over previous generation hardware.

In addition to improved memory performance, Intel has introduced some other enhancements. The New Intel® Xeon Processors now include Intel® Turbo Boost Technology that improves performance by allowing the operating system to increase core frequencies within the current power envelope. The idea is to increase the clock speed of cores if others are idle while still staying within the thermal specifications. In addition, Intel® Intelligent Power Technology allows for individual cores to be powered down when not in use. The power draw for both memory and the I/O controller on idle nodes can be reduced as well, bringing the idle power consumption for the Nehalem to 10 watts.

There are other improvements worth noting. While not used as much in HPC, Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology is back allowing more threads than cores to operate at the same time. Memory Capacity is now 144GB and the L3 cache is shared between all cores on each Nehalem processor. There have been other improvements in virtualization technology as well.

Traditional HPC Rack-Mounted Servers vs. Blade Systems

Maria McLaughlin — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:35:09 +0000

Traditional rack-mounted servers require additional infrastructure and a host of hidden costs to IT ownership that can significantly inflate the total cost of operation. Rack-mounted servers make a relatively dense infrastructure by fitting up to 40 1U servers in a standard rack cabinet, but still require many repetitive parts, including adapters, cables, network switches, power strips, management devices, and/or KVM solutions. To increase availability, you often have to double those components for redundancy. In addition, there is the installation time and integration cost associated.
In comparison, blades can have the same features as standard servers and run the same applications. The important difference is that blades share a common backplane “building block solution”. This integrated backplane of a blade system reduces the number of interconnecting cables and devices. In recent years, the HPC market has witnessed a dramatic shift towards blade technology, with midsize HPC datacenters increasingly adopting them for mainstream deployments. Blades are proving to be the form factor of choice for many mid- to large-scale server deployments by bringing advantages in price-performance, power and cooling, reduced datacenter floor space, management, and control over rack-mounted servers. Because of the greater server density achievable through blades, they were initially focused on solutions such as server centralization and consolidation. Today, HPC IT administrators are recognizing the operational management and cost benefits of blades, and are deploying them to drive down both capital and operational expenses.

Consider This When Building HPC Clusters

Maria McLaughlin — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:15:22 +0000

Many IT departments in the high performance computing market are feeling the rising pressure to deliver more capacity computing and performance while trying to reduce the total cost of ownership.

High Performance Computing (HPC) pushes the limits of computing performance, enabling people in science, research, and business to solve computationally intensive problems, such as those in chemistry or biology, quantum physics, petroleum exploration, crash test simulation, CG rendering, and financial risk analysis. HPC cluster systems have almost single-handedly propelled the HPC market's skyrocketing growth in recent years and drove HPC revenue past $11 billion in 2007. IDC expects that HPC will remain one of the bright spots in the IT space over the next few years, despite of the troubled global economy.

For HPC, clusters are firmly entrenched as the dominant species of technical server revenue. Within the HPC cluster universe, 1U rack-mounted server clusters continue to play an active role because of their large global installed base and the advantage of being highly available as a commodity product. In addition, rack-mounted clusters allow users to mix and match servers from different vendors within and across racks with no vendor lock-in. However, the sales momentum in recent months has shifted decidedly toward blade-based clusters, especially as blade technology has matured.

Appro Delivers HyperGreen Cluster Solution to Support Rice University Computational Research Projects

Maria McLaughlin — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:03:53 +0000

Appro, a leading provider of supercomputing solutions, today announced the award of a mid-sized Appro HyperGreen(TM) Intel(R) Cluster Ready certified solution for Rice University's Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology in Houston. Located in the world's energy capital, Rice is a leader in the application of high-performance computing (HPC) for the oil and gas industry, and the university also boasts cutting-edge computational research in disciplines as diverse as biomedicine, energy, the environment, nanotechnology and materials science.

Rice University needed a modern, energy-efficient, high performance cluster capable to provide both high memory bandwidth and a fast interconnection network with full bisection bandwidth critical for their diverse tightly-coupled data-intensive parallel applications.

Rice's Appro HyperGreen Cluster solution will be shipped and installed this spring. The entire system consists of two fully integrated high-performance computing clusters based on the latest Quad-Core Intel(R) Xeon(R) 5500 series processors. It will contain 94 nodes with 752 processing cores using InfiniBand switches and Mellanox dual-port DDR InfiniBand HCAs. The system will be pre-configured with Appro BladeDome remote server management software designed to provide simplified administration along with cluster installation services and support.

"We are proud to provide Rice University with our Appro HyperGreen Cluster Solution for science computational research," said Daniel Kim, president and CEO of Appro. "Today, end-users can get a full range of high-performance computing taking advantage of Appro's mid-range innovative cluster solution packaged with the latest green technologies."

"Appro HyperGreen Cluster offers a dense, modular and Intel Cluster Ready certified solution that simplifies and accelerates HPC cluster deployment," said Richard Dracott, general manager of high-performance computing at Intel Corporation. "For this award, the Appro HyperGreen Cluster takes full advantage of Intel's QuickPath Technologies by providing Rice University researchers the expanded memory capacity and improved system I/O memory they need to continue producing world-class results allowing the Kennedy Institute to support a growing portfolio of computational science and engineering research."

Appro Unveils High-Density HyperGreen™ Cluster Solution

Maria McLaughlin — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:18:00 +0000

[Excerpt] Appro Unveils High-Density HyperGreen™ Cluster Solution to boost Power Efficiency and Performance in the Datacenter. Appro, a leading provider of supercomputing solutions, announced today the launch of the new Appro HyperGreen Cluster Solution and the support of the new Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processors 5500 series across all product lines.

Click here to download "Appro Hypergreen Press Release"

No More Excuses: Green Blades Let You Do More with Less

Maria McLaughlin — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:47:11 +0000

The introduction of Intel Xeon processor (Nehalem) is perhaps one of the most anticipated HPC events in recent history. It represents a huge change in the micro-architecture that will influence the performance and power envelope for years to come. But, this is not the only thing you should be excited about. The exciting news is you don't need to deploy the new Intel Nehalem in the same old loud and power hungry 1U servers. New and efficient green blades are the way forward. Appro has announced a new GreenBlade Series of products that have cost parity with 1U servers. However, the advantage does not stop there. With a green design you can expect 20% less power usage over existing 1U systems. Did we mention that this new blade comes with the new Intel® Xeon® Processors? Now you can get excited. To Read more go to www.linux-mag.com/id/7280/