HPC Asia - Taiwan

HPC Asia is the HPC conference for APAC, it occurs every 18 months in a different country of the region and it is currently being held at the Grand Hi-Lai Hotel, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

It's always good to see familiar faces and Quadrics customers among the speakers invited, to name just a few: Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, Peter Arzberger from the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Zhiwei Xu from the Chinese Academy of Science, Mark Seager from LLNL.

For those interested to see the whole programme please click on this link.

Quadrics local sales representatives are attending, if you want to get in touch with them feel free send an email to sales@quadrics.com with your mobile number and the best time you'd like to meet and we'll follow it up.

Article on Cluster Interconnects from HPCCommunity Kusu toolkit

HPCCommunity.org is a technical community for High Performance Computing (HPC) sponsored by Platform Computing Corporation and dedicated to supporting both Platform Computing and non-Platform technologies. Within HPCCommunity you'll find Kusu, an open source cluster toolkit. It is the foundation of Platform Computing's Open Cluster Stack (OCS5) and Red Hat HPC Solution and has an interesting section on Technical Articles, Tips and Tricks. The following extracts come from "KUSU 103: Beowulf Cluster Best Practices", which appeared yesterday:

3.3 Cluster Interconnects.

Most small clusters have only one network and this is typically Gigabit Ethernet.

For larger clusters it is common to see i) Administration network typically GE, ii) HPC Network usually one of Infiniband, Quadrics or Myrinet, iii) Out-of-Band network.

The focus of this section is on the HPC Network.

Firstly determine if you your code will benefit from a HPC network. For bandwidth sensitive codes or IO intensive codes, then using Infiniband, Quadrics or Myrinet would help tremendously.

Which HPC network is the best? For that answer - you would have to know the characteristics of your code. Best to run your applications on the network you intend to buy - beg and borrow resources from your friends and colleagues in the community or the vendor to test.

In real-world MPI codes, Quadrics is typically the fastest due to its SHMEM capabilities. Quadrics also has excellent MPI management software in the form of RMS.

For people in the know, they are willing to pay the premium for Quadrics.

Read in full on this link.

What is HPC?

HPC (High Performance Computing) is the use of high-end computing resources (computers, storage, networking and visualization) to help solve highly complex problems, perform business critical analyses, or to run computationally intensive workloads that are in scale far beyond the tasks that could be achieved on today's leading desktop systems.

Acknowledgements: from sharcnet website.

Quadrics, leading developer and supplier of interconnect technology for HPC

Quadrics is a leading developer and supplier of interconnect technology for High Performance Computing.

Quadrics products form an integral part of some of the world's largest computers, allowing many thousands of processors to be used as a single system, and have been selected by the world's leading vendors and integrators as well as major supercomputing centres.
Quadrics' third generation of interconnect product, QsNet3, is a multi-stage or 'fat tree' switch network connecting commodity servers. It has been specifically designed to maximise the performance of large HPC applications.

QsNet3 comprises adapters, switches, cables allowing the construction of federated network of up to 4096 nodes. QsNet3 software includes support for HPC programming tools including MPI, Shmem, UPC and Lustre. HPC specific optimisations include low latency, high bandwidth links, adaptive routing (used extensively to distribute network load), hardware barrier and broadcast support. Quadrics interconnect is particularly suited to large simulation programs that require the combination of outstanding network performance and 24 7 production execution.

For information about Quadrics please see our website, www.quadrics.com.