HPC

I’ve mentioned it before: the run-time systems of MPI implementations are frequently unsung heroes. A lot of blood, sweat, tears, and innovation goes into parallel run time systems, particularly those that can scale to very large systems.  But they’re  not discussed often, mainly because…

As usual, in the post-Supercomputing / post-US-Thanksgiving-holiday lull, the work that we have all put off since we started ignoring it to prepare for Supercomputing catches up to us.  Inevitably, it means that my writing here at the blog falls behind in December.  Sorry, folks! To make up for that…

I’ve previously written about libfabric.  Here’s some highlights: libfabric is a set of next-generation, community-driven, ultra-low latency networking APIs The APIs are not tied to any particular networking hardware model Cisco is actively helping define, design, and develop the libfab…

Cisco is pleased to announce the intention to support the Intel MPI Library™ with usNIC on the UCS server and Nexus switches product lines over the ultra low latency Ethernet and routable IP transports, at both 10GE and 40GE speeds. usNIC will be enabled by a simple library plugin to the uDAPL frame…

I’ve mentioned libfabric on this blog a few times: it’s a set of next-generation APIs that allow direct access to networking hardware (e.g., high-speed / low latency NICs) from Linux userspace (kernel access is in the works). To give you a little perspective: the libfabric APIs are aimed…

I’m stealing this text directly from Torsten Hoefler‘s blog, because I think it’s directly relevant to many of this blog’s readers: Our book on “Using Advanced MPI” will appear in about a month — now it’s the time to pre-order on Amazon at a reduced price. It is released by t…

It’s that time of year again — we’re at about T-2.5 weeks to the Supercomputing conference and trade show;  SC’14 is in New Orleans, November 16-21. Are you going to get some tasty gumbo and supercharged computing power?   If so, come say hi!  The Cisco booth is 2715.…

Today’s blog post is by Nathan Hjelm, a Research Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and a core developer on the Open MPI project. The latest version of the “vader” shared memory Byte Transport Layer (BTL) in the upcoming Open MPI v1.8.4 release is bringing better small me…

Today’s guest post comes from Ralph Castain, a principle engineer at Intel.  The bulk of this post is an email he sent explaining the concept of a “slot” in typical HPC schedulers. This is a little departure from the normal fare on this blog, but is still a critical concept to unde…