A System Software Architecture for High-End Computing

Large MPP systems can neither solve grand-challenge scientific problems nor enable large scale industrial and governmental simulations if they rely on extensions to workstation system software. At Sandia National Laboratories we have developed, with our vendors, a new system architecture for highend computing. Highest performance is achieved by providing applications with a light-weight interface to a collection of processing nodes. Usability is provided by creating node partitions specialized for user access, networking, and I/O. The entire system is glued together by a data movement interface which we call portals. Portals allow data to flow between processing nodes with minimal system overhead while maintaining a suitable degree of protection and reconfigurability. 1 Introduction The power of the last decade's supercomputers is now available in affordable desktop systems. However, the demand for ever increasing computational power has not abated. For example, the US Departm..

Getting Started with Zoltan: a Short Tutorial

The Zoltan library is a toolkit of parallel combinatorial algorithms for unstructured and/or adaptive computations. In this paper, we describe the most significant tools in Zoltan: dynamic partitioning, graph coloring and ordering. We also describe how to obtain, build, and use Zoltan in parallel applications

Cplant

The Computational Plant project at Sandia National Laboratories is developing a large-scale, massively parallel computing resource from a cluster of commodity computing and networking components. We are combining the knowledge and research of previous and ongoing commodity cluster projects with our expertise in designing, developing, using, and maintaining large-scale MPP machines. This paper describes the main parts of the architecture and discusses the most important design choices and decisions. Scaling to hundreds and thousands of nodes requires more than simply combining readilyavailable software and hardware. We will highlight some of the more crucial pieces that make Cplant scalable. 1 Introduction The Computational Plant (Cplant) project began at Sandia National Laboratories in Spring of 1997. The initial idea was to explore commodity-based cluster technology and build a facility that would provide compute cycles like a power plant provides electricity. Distant sites should b..