10,071 research outputs found
The Strategy of the Commons: Modelling the Annual Cost of Successful ICT Services for European Research
The provision of ICT services for research is increasingly using Cloud services to complement the traditional federation of computing centres. Due to the complex funding structure and differences in the basic business model, comparing the cost-effectiveness of these options requires a new approach to cost assessment. This paper presents a cost assessment method addressing the limitations of the standard methods and some of the initial results of the study. This acts as an illustration of the kind of cost assessment issues high-utilisation rate ICT services should consider when choosing between different infrastructure options. The research is co-funded by the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme through the e-FISCAL project (contract number RI-283449)
The Dark Energy Survey Data Management System
The Dark Energy Survey collaboration will study cosmic acceleration with a
5000 deg2 griZY survey in the southern sky over 525 nights from 2011-2016. The
DES data management (DESDM) system will be used to process and archive these
data and the resulting science ready data products. The DESDM system consists
of an integrated archive, a processing framework, an ensemble of astronomy
codes and a data access framework. We are developing the DESDM system for
operation in the high performance computing (HPC) environments at NCSA and
Fermilab. Operating the DESDM system in an HPC environment offers both speed
and flexibility. We will employ it for our regular nightly processing needs,
and for more compute-intensive tasks such as large scale image coaddition
campaigns, extraction of weak lensing shear from the full survey dataset, and
massive seasonal reprocessing of the DES data. Data products will be available
to the Collaboration and later to the public through a virtual-observatory
compatible web portal. Our approach leverages investments in publicly available
HPC systems, greatly reducing hardware and maintenance costs to the project,
which must deploy and maintain only the storage, database platforms and
orchestration and web portal nodes that are specific to DESDM. In Fall 2007, we
tested the current DESDM system on both simulated and real survey data. We used
Teragrid to process 10 simulated DES nights (3TB of raw data), ingesting and
calibrating approximately 250 million objects into the DES Archive database. We
also used DESDM to process and calibrate over 50 nights of survey data acquired
with the Mosaic2 camera. Comparison to truth tables in the case of the
simulated data and internal crosschecks in the case of the real data indicate
that astrometric and photometric data quality is excellent.Comment: To be published in the proceedings of the SPIE conference on
Astronomical Instrumentation (held in Marseille in June 2008). This preprint
is made available with the permission of SPIE. Further information together
with preprint containing full quality images is available at
http://desweb.cosmology.uiuc.edu/wik
Type-driven automated program transformations and cost modelling for optimising streaming programs on FPGAs
In this paper we present a novel approach to program optimisation based on compiler-based type-driven program transformations and a fast and accurate cost/performance model for the target architecture. We target streaming programs for the problem domain of scientific computing, such as numerical weather prediction. We present our theoretical framework for type-driven program transformation, our target high-level language and intermediate representation languages and the cost model and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by comparison with a commercial toolchain
Many-Task Computing and Blue Waters
This report discusses many-task computing (MTC) generically and in the
context of the proposed Blue Waters systems, which is planned to be the largest
NSF-funded supercomputer when it begins production use in 2012. The aim of this
report is to inform the BW project about MTC, including understanding aspects
of MTC applications that can be used to characterize the domain and
understanding the implications of these aspects to middleware and policies.
Many MTC applications do not neatly fit the stereotypes of high-performance
computing (HPC) or high-throughput computing (HTC) applications. Like HTC
applications, by definition MTC applications are structured as graphs of
discrete tasks, with explicit input and output dependencies forming the graph
edges. However, MTC applications have significant features that distinguish
them from typical HTC applications. In particular, different engineering
constraints for hardware and software must be met in order to support these
applications. HTC applications have traditionally run on platforms such as
grids and clusters, through either workflow systems or parallel programming
systems. MTC applications, in contrast, will often demand a short time to
solution, may be communication intensive or data intensive, and may comprise
very short tasks. Therefore, hardware and software for MTC must be engineered
to support the additional communication and I/O and must minimize task dispatch
overheads. The hardware of large-scale HPC systems, with its high degree of
parallelism and support for intensive communication, is well suited for MTC
applications. However, HPC systems often lack a dynamic resource-provisioning
feature, are not ideal for task communication via the file system, and have an
I/O system that is not optimized for MTC-style applications. Hence, additional
software support is likely to be required to gain full benefit from the HPC
hardware
PROFET: modeling system performance and energy without simulating the CPU
The approaching end of DRAM scaling and expansion of emerging memory technologies is motivating a lot of research in future memory systems. Novel memory systems are typically explored by hardware simulators that are slow and often have a simplified or obsolete abstraction of the CPU. This study presents PROFET, an analytical model that predicts how an application's performance and energy consumption changes when it is executed on different memory systems. The model is based on instrumentation of an application execution on actual hardware, so it already takes into account CPU microarchitectural details such as the data prefetcher and out-of-order engine. PROFET is evaluated on two real platforms: Sandy Bridge-EP E5-2670 and Knights Landing Xeon Phi platforms with various memory configurations. The evaluation results show that PROFET's predictions are accurate, typically with only 2% difference from the values measured on actual hardware. We release the PROFET source code and all input data required for memory system and application profiling. The released package can be seamlessly installed and used on high-end Intel platforms.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
From FPGA to ASIC: A RISC-V processor experience
This work document a correct design flow using these tools in the Lagarto RISC- V Processor and the RTL design considerations that must be taken into account, to move from a design for FPGA to design for ASIC
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