Slides which contain outdated info are marked [old]Table of Contents of the presentation:Hydra (title page only)Applications of parallel computing Typical ways to make your program parallel What are PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) and MPI (Message Passing Interface)? Price/performance issues [old] Price/performance issues - cont'd Comparison of supercomputers (1999) |
Author: Pawel Artymowicz Email: pawel@astro.su.se Home Page: http://planets.utsc.utoronto.ca/~pawel |
Note on the reliability of Hydra (May 2001):
There are 7 Ultra 5 nodes w/o keyboards or monitors plus one regular
workstation. Each unit has a power cord and a short twisted pair cable
to the Fast Ethernet switch. It was uncertain in the beginning if we needed
a little monitor and keyboard next to hydra for monitoring/repairs.They
were simply unnecessary. On one or two occasions over the past 2.5 yr hydra
needed attention: notably when the main fan mounted on a pizza box of Ultra
5 failed, this not only went unnoticed for x days, but even after detection
turned out not to have caused any noticeable rise in the temperature of
the box itself. The cpu fan seems to have provided sufficient cooling for
the entire box, although it must be mentioned that the system is in an
airconditioned closet. Failure rate of ~2/8/2.5 times/node/yr ~ 1/(10
yr)/node is remarkably low. In addition, on the software side the whole
system is prectically zero maintainance. It only hanged and had to be restated
several times in its life (except for scheduled upgrades). Can you
beat that?
Recent work done with Hydra (gzipped postscript,
1.8 MB):
"External perturbations and structure
of the beta Pictoris disk" ,
B.Sc.
thesis by Anders Jeneskog (April 2001). A million-particle simulation
of the famous dust disk's dynamics. Contains chapters on MPI, MPI
vs. PVM, and more.
Additional reading on: Low-budget parallel supercomputation. Competing Linux clusters etc. (1999)