Your hardware vendor may be able to provide the information you need to install and run open source HPC applications. Another great resource is the HPC Advisory Council. The Advisory Council provides best practice recommendations and installation guides for a variety of HPC applications, as well as training opportunities, an online forum for interacting with HPC experts, and cluster resources you can use for testing, optimizing, and benchmarking your applications.

Intel has been working with the HPC Advisory Council to develop best practice recommendations and installation guides for popular open source HPC applications running on Intel Cluster Ready certified systems. Installation guides are available now for Adaptive Mesh Refinement, BQCD, CP2K, CPMD, Espresso, Himeno, LAMMPS, NAMD, NWChem, OpenFOAM, and WRF. If you don’t see the application you’re interested in, stay tuned. More are coming. Or contact the HPC Advisory Council. They’re always looking for input from HPC users.

Update - these installation guides are now available: Amber 11, CESM, GADGET-2, GROMACS, MrBayes, NEMO, Octopus, and OpenMX.

>> View all Intel Cluster Ready Installation Best Practices

For more about the HPC Advisory Council, go to hpcadvisorycouncil.com

For more Intel Cluster Ready information, visit intel.com/go/cluster

Read the HPC Advisory Council and Intel Cluster Ready Technology Brief

While manning the Intel Cluster Ready demonstration pod, I was able to listen in on Drew and Kirk talk about how real-time simulations are helping protect football players from serious injury.  They showed how helmets outfitted with sensors are being used to study and relay data about individual impacts to the head of players.  Simulations for those impacts can predict when dangerous levels of force have occurred and players are likely to have suffered a concussion.

This data can be used to help design better equipment, but more importantly may help prevent serious, long-term injury.  Players who have experienced a concussion may not feel the immediate effects or may not want to leave the game.  Additional impacts, however, can cause much more severe injury.  The simulation data can help identify when players need to be pulled out of a game for medical evaluation and/or to avoid serious injury.

It was a really cool demonstration to see - they even cracked two helmets together to show a live simulation of impact. One of many neat examples of high performance computing in action that I got to see at the show.

>> See related stories

Desktop Engineering: Intel to Safeguard Brains

Intel Newsroom: Intel Teams Up with Leading Researchers to Make Football Helmets Safer

Were you there? Please leave your comments about SC10.

Check back for more news and a follow-up from SC10.

Let Intel Cluster Ready be your guide…

Take the Intel Innovation Tour, learn about some of the Intel Cluster Ready partners, and enter to win a HP Pavilion Mini Netbook. Several tours each day, and a daily drawing at 5:00pm Wed. Check at Intel booth #2813 for times and details.

In-Booth Presentations & Demos at Intel Booth #2813
Come by to see the demos, hear about the latest Intel technologies, and catch up with the Intel Cluster Ready team and partners.

Presentation:

• Wednesday, Nov. 17, 10:00 am – Intel's Bill Magro will present Everything Works! End User Experience with Intel Cluster Ready. Come hear about end users like Simpson Strong-Tie and others who are reaping the value of an Intel Cluster Ready cluster.

Demos:

• 7 Reasons Why You Need Intel Cluster Ready, by Aspen Systems, Inc., Professional HPC Clusters and Services
• Appro Ready-To-Go Cluster Demo: Ready-To-Go Clusters for Seismic Coverage Validation Engine, part of Halliburton, Landmark ProMAX® software suite - Maximize geophysical investments with Appro Ready-To-Go Cluster, a pre-configured Intel® Cluster Ready certified supercomputing solution. Pre-tested to run Landmark's new Seismic Coverage Validation software tools, this solution makes the process of choosing the right system easy.

More Fun Events to Come at SC10!

HPC Idol 2010 – Giving up those HPC blues. Have time for a party on Wednesday evening? Don't miss the Platform Computing party at the House of Blues, from 6:30 – 10:00pm, Nov 17th.

Possibly, one of the highlights of this event will be an original, never before and likely never again, song from Intel Cluster Ready.... "Get Ready" with back-up vocals by the "Clusterettes."

How do you get your invitation to attend? Just stop by the Platform Computing booth #2739, Intel booth #2813, or QLogic booth #3649 to ask for an invitation to attend!

Partner Presentations

In the Appro Booth #1939:
Wednesday Nov 17th -

• 11:15am – Intel Cluster Ready and Appro Ready-To-Go Clusters, Rick Layden, Intel

• 11:45pm – Ready-To-Go Clusters with ANSYS, Barbara Hutchings, ANSYS

In the QLogic Booth #3649:
Wednesday Nov 17th -

• 1:30 pm – It's all about InfiniBand Clusters, presented by Jeremy Siadal of Intel.

Don't forget to look for us, your Intel Cluster Ready team, in booths 2813 and 4517.

Hope to see you here in New Orleans!

Each of the Cray CX1000's technologies is best-of-class and can be mixed and matched in a single rack – creating a customized hybrid computing platform to meet a variety of scientific workloads.

It's like you can finally get that square peg through the round hole.

Check out the options:
The CX1000-C offers scale-out computing, offering 18 nodes of dual-socket Intel Xeon 5600 processing in a 7U form factor, including a 36 port QDR IB switch and a 24 port Ethernet switch.

The CX1000-G offers scale-through (GPU) computing, offering nine nodes of dual socket Intel Xeon 5600 computing, accelerated by dual NVIDIA Tesla sockets, with the same switches as above.

The CX1000-S offers scale-up computing with SMP nodes built on Intel’s QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) technology offering “fat memory” nodes.

The Genesis of the CX1000
The Cray CX1 system was designed to take Cray’s heritage in supercomputing and make that experience available to users with supercomputing needs – but without big research lab budgets. This $15-100K class of user told us they wanted accessible, easy-to-implement HPC. And we responded with the CX1 deskside supercomputer – our first product brought to you in partnership with Intel.

With the power of HPC now in hand, our new worldwide network of users and resellers started reporting back. They wanted Cray to expand the product family such that the CX1 system’s benefits – ease of use, seamless integration – could be extended to more powerful implementations.

We bit.

We’re very pleased to announce the CX1000 series – a product that builds on the CX1 story, but takes it up to 10 Teraflops and beyond. Starting at under $100K, the CX1000 gives users high(brid) performance computing in both software and hardware. The Cray CX1000 series offers the three most important HPC architectures of the next decade – scale out, scale through and scale up. And it also allows you to select from the widest range of industry-standard HPC software through full support of Windows HPC Server 2008, Linux or dual-boot configurations.

So go ahead, eat that cake.

For more information, go to www.cray.com/Products/CX1000/Chassis.aspx

This has created a chasm between the workstation and its natural upgrade path - the cluster. They operate in different worlds – one is often running Windows, the other Linux. One is managed by the user or department, and the other controlled by IT. One is normally freely available to the individual while the other is dependent on a queue of users wanting time on a shared resource.

So what is the workstation user who needs more power to do? We think the answer is to combine the functionality of the workstation and the cluster into one departmental system – like the Cray CX1. The Cray CX1 supports the NVIDIA Quadro graphics cards for high end graphics performance, delivering workstation capabilities based on Intel 5500 processors. It also supports in one low cost chassis up to 6 additional nodes for a full Intel 5500 based cluster, networked either through Gigabit Ethernet or InfiniBand.

This means the user gets all the power they need in a workstation, but the additional capability to scale-out their jobs in the cluster nodes - achieving cluster performance right there in the office. There is no dependence on IT, and no need to wait in line for a shared resource. The workstation user can get back to "work" with their Cray CX1 workstation and  get the job done faster.

Workstations used to be very cool, and with Intel 5500 processors and a Cray CX1, they are cool once again!

Founded in 1995, Lakes Environmental is an IT company offering a complete line of air dispersion modeling, risk assessment, emimssions inventory, and emergency release software, as well as training and custom software services.  Lakes is using their Cray CX1 to run air dispersion modeling reports that help industrial customers reduce air pollutant emissions and enable them to demonstrate real-time compliance with governmental regulations.  Read more about Lakes Environmental and their Cray CX1 at http://www.cray.com/LC.aspx?ref=/Assets/PDF/products/cx1/LakesEnvironmental_CS.pdf

In our research we recently observed that HPC users demonstrate little-to-no loyalty to processor vendors. They'll switch to the best price/performance any moment it changes. We therefore observed that AMD had a chance to gain ground with six-core Istanbul.

After seeing the reaction to both at ISC, it looks like Intel is set to continue its dominance in the near term.

For more winners and losers from ISC, listen to this HPCwire Soundbite podcast, recorded by editor Michael Feldman and I on location in Hamburg: http://tinyurl.com/l7gwsu

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.

The JuRoPA II project's intended aim is to lead the way for the next generation of general purpose cluster computing on Petaflop Architectures. It is a research activity that brings together the most experienced companies and research sites & uses state-of-the art processor, server, interconnect and cluster software technologies. INTEL, MELLANOX and PARTEC have partnered with the Jülich Supercomputer Centre (JSC) to establish an architecture based on Intel processor technology with a QDR Infiniband interconnect and the Parastation Cluster management Software.

The Jülich Supercomputer Centre (JSC) has chosen Bull as the prime contractor and SUN as the sub contractor. ParTec’s Cluster Competence Centre will manage the cluster on a day-to-day basic. The JuRoPA-II cluster consists of two parts. A 1080 node cluster from Bull (HPC-FF cluster) will be made available to the Fusion community while the 2208 node cluster from SUN is intended for general purpose use within JSC. It has a total of 3288 compute nodes based on the Intel Nehalem-EP 2.93 GHz processor. When used as a heterogeneous cluster, the 26304 cores give the machine a theoretical peak performance in excess of 300 TFlops.

The HPC-FF cluster will be used to understand the complex physical effects taking place inside the ITER fusion reactor. HPC-FF alone will deliver computing power in excess of 100 TFlops and is optimally suited to fusion scientist's simulation programs. The European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA) has enlisted the Forschungszentrum Jülich, one of the world’s leading supercomputing centres, to host and operating the FF cluster.

ParaStationV5, ParTec's cluster management software, will play a key role following the machine's acceptance. The driving power behind ParTec’s software solutions is the motivation to unburden the customer from many of those daily, time consuming, problems associated with cluster administration. By providing comprehensive telemetry of the machine – ParTec's GridMonitor software enables problems to be identified and fixed before they cause applications to fail. This feature is seen as particularly important in a machine with an annual power budget in excess of 1M Euros.

The JuRoPA II machine is currently under construction. Its expected completion date is mid June '09.

PART II (next week) – Details of the JuRoPA II configuration

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