Clik here to view.
Hadoop's Uncomfortable Fit in HPC
Hadoop has come up in a few conversations I've had in the last few days, and it's occurred to me that the supercomputing community continues having a difficult time fully understanding how Hadoop...
View ArticleMassive Parallelism and the Outlook for CUDA
Massive ParallelismThe future of high performance computing (and the so-called exascale computing) lies squarely in the realm of massively parallel computing systems. When I first began hearing about...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Quick MPI Cluster Setup on Amazon EC2
PremiseI was recently tasked with doing some MPI benchmarks on Amazon EC2 to get a general idea of how well EC2's Cluster Compute capabilities perform. I had never used EC2 before, so the notion of...
View ArticleSpark on Supercomputers: A Few Notes
I've been working with Apache Spark quite a bit lately in an effort to bring it into the fold as a viable tool for solving some of the data-intensive problems encountered in supercomputing. I've...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Perspectives on the Current State of Data-Intensive Scientific Computing
I recently had the benefit of being invited to attend two workshops in Oakland, CA, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), that shared the common theme of emerging trends in data-intensive...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Exascale in perspective: RSC's 1.2 petaflop rack
Russian supercomputing manufacturer RSC generated some buzz at ISC'14 last week when they showed their 1.2 PF-per-rack Xeon Phi-based platform. I was aware of this system from when they first...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Storage Utilization in the Long Tail of Science
Shameless AdvertisingIf the things I discuss in this blog post sound like something you'd like to do professionally, you're in luck! NERSC is looking to fill a position in user services in conjunction...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reality Check on Cloud Usage for HPC
The opinions and analysis expressed here are solely my own and do not reflect those of my employer or the National Science Foundation.I get very bent out of shape when people start speaking...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Thoughts on the NSF Future Directions Interim Report
The National Academies recently released an interim report entitled Future Directions for NSF Advanced Computing Infrastructure to Support U.S. Science and Engineering in 2017-2020 as a part of a...
View ArticleMore Conjecture on KNL's Near Memory
The Platform ran an interesting collection of conjectures on how KNL's on-package MCDRAM might be used this morning, and I recommend reading through it if you're following the race to exascale. I was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What "university-owned" supercomputers mean to me
The opinions and analysis expressed here are solely my own and do not reflect those of my employer or its funders.insideHPC ran an article yesterday called "Purdue Supercomputing Empowers Researchers"...
View ArticleOn "active learning" and teaching science
Nature ran an article last week by Dr. Mitchell Waldrop titled "Why we are teaching science wrong, and how to make it right" (or alternatively, "The science of teaching science") which really ground my...
View ArticleClik here to view.
An uninformed perspective on TaihuLight's design
Note: What follows are my own personal thoughts, opinions, and analyses. I am not a computer scientist and I don't really know anything about processor design or application performance, so it is safe...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Basics of I/O Benchmarking
Most people in the supercomputing business are familiar with using FLOPS as a proxy for how fast or capable a supercomputer is. This measurement, as observed using the High-Performance Linpack (HPL)...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Learning electronics with roulette, datasheets, and Raspberry Pi
I've had a few electronics kits kicking around for years now that I'd never sat down and put together. At a glance, these kits all seemed like they were designed to be soldering practice that resulted...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reviewing the state of the art of burst buffers
If you're interested in burst buffers and happen to be a student, please reach out and contact me! We have an internship opportunity in performance analysis of our 1.8 PB/1.5 TB/sec burst buffer for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A less-biased look at tape versus disks
Executive SummaryTape isn't dead despite what object store vendors may tell you, and it still plays an important role in both small- and large-scale storage environments. Disk-based object stores...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Understanding I/O on the mid-2017 iMac
My wife recently bought me a brand new mid-2017 iMac to replace my ailing, nine-year-old HP desktop. Back when I got the HP, I was just starting to learn about how computers really worked and really...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Are FPGAs the answer to HPC's woes?
Executive SummaryNot yet. I'll demonstrate why no domain scientist would ever want to program in Verilog, then highlight a few promising directions of development that are addressing this fact.The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A week in the life of an SC attendee
Last week was the annual Supercomputing conference, held this year in Dallas, and it was as busy as they always are. Every year I take plenty of photos and post plenty of tweets throughout the week,...
View Article