SC14 blog – Day four, George Beckett

Today was my last day at the Supercomputing 2014 conference, as I start my long journey back to Perth this evening.

The first appointment of the day was a meeting with a team from Sandia National Labs, for Chris B and me, to learn about a monitoring tool that they have been developing called LDMS. The tool is deployed onto a supercomputer or cluster and monitors various aspects of the load on the system — such as communications performance, CPU load, and memory usage. LDMS is similar to Ganglia, which iVEC uses to monitor its older systems Epic and Fornax. However, LDMS is better suited to large-scale systems than Ganglia, say the developers, as it places a lower load on both the compute nodes and the fabric. Further, it supports the Cray Aries interconnect that provides the fabric for both iVEC’s Magnus and Galaxy supercomputers (whereas Ganglia does not). Definitely something to consider as an option for production monitoring on the Pawsey resources.

The second half of the morning was spent in an SKA workshop, discussing the impact of next-generation sensor networks — such as SKA — on HPC. As well as providing a chance to catch-up with some of our collaborators in the Science Data Processor element, it was also a chance to share some of the progress from the first year or so of SKA with the wider HPC community.

Today was also the day on which the Student Cluster Challenge results were announced. The winner was, as last year, University of Texas, though the iVEC team looks to have performed strongly and provided competitive attempts at all of the challenges that were set.

The exhibition closed mid-afternoon, wrapping up Australian HPCs third unified presence at the conference: with three days of welcoming visitors, presenting Tim Tam talks, and running demonstrations — including both Drishti and Maali (the new name for iBS). We have put in our selection for a booth place at SC’15, which will be held in Austin Texas next November, and for which we have great plans.

The conference does not actually finish until tomorrow (Friday),when iVEC is represented on three separate workshops during the morning — co-chairing sessions on HPC User Support Tools and Training Best Practice in Supercomputing, plus contributing to a third workshop on Women in HPC. I suspect you’ll be able to read all about these workshops over the next couple of days. However, for me, it’s time to board my flight to LAX,

MGB, 20/NOV/14