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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / MAY 26, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 21
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Applications:
NPACI ROCKS MARKS MILESTONES
By Mike Gannis, SDSC Senior Science Writer
Researchers with the National Partnership for Advanced Computational
Infrastructure (NPACI) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) marked
significant milestones this week for the NPACI Rocks toolkit, which enables
users to more easily set up and manage powerful yet inexpensive cluster
computers. With at least 100 systems created using the package, the processing
potential of computers administered by the NPACI Rocks software suite now
exceeds 15 teraflops -- computing power that researchers all over the world
are using to advance science in fields from biomedicine to geophysics.
"The aggregate power of the clusters running NPACI Rocks is in the same league
as the largest supercomputer systems in the world," said Philip Papadopoulos,
program director for SDSC's Grid and Cluster Computing group. "The number of
systems and processors demonstrates the wide acceptance of NPACI Rocks in the
user community."
"I am extremely happy with the performance of the NPACI Rocks cluster
distribution," said Tim Carlson of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in
Richland, Washington. "I have been installing clusters for the past five years
and have tried many types of software. In my experience, Rocks clusters
provide the right combination of stability, maintainability, and ease of
installation."
According to the Rocks Register at
www.rocksclusters.org/rocks-register/, 100 computer systems -- many
with true supercomputer processing power -- have been created using NPACI
Rocks, and more than 5,000 CPUs run the software suite. A Pentium 4 cluster
used in the Bio-X project at Stanford University runs at more than 3.3
teraflops and five clusters at Brown University have a total processing power
of 1.2 teraflops. Cluster computers at the Karlsruhe Research Center in
Germany (1.1 teraflops), the University of South Carolina (671 gigaflops), the
University of Nevada (614 gigaflops), and Scripps Institution of Oceanography
(355 gigaflops) also stand out as powerful systems for scientific research.
The latest version of the toolkit, released a month ago, works both with 32-
bit CPUs from Intel, AMD, and other chip makers and with 64-bit systems based
on the Intel Itanium2 processor. (The Itanium2 also is used in commercially
available supercomputers from such vendors as IBM and Hewlett-Packard.)
"The clusters listed on the register illustrate the scalability and
versatility of NPACI Rocks," said Mason Katz, group leader for the software
development effort. "At one end of the scale there's a five-processor Pentium
II system with only 1.5 gigaflops of power. There are all kinds of 32-bit and
64-bit configurations all the way up to Stanford's 604-processor Bio-X cluster
at 3.3 teraflops."
Commodity clusters based on PC-type processors ("Beowulf clusters") provide
impressive power for the cost of their hardware. But the cost of managing them
-- ensuring that all of the nodes of a system have a consistent set of
software when patches and new versions of the operating system, utilities, and
tools are released -- can be a real burden to system administrators.
Unfortunately, the costs of not managing a cluster can be even more expensive,
if security holes and known software bugs remain unpatched because the system
software isn't upgraded often enough.
"SDSC's Cluster Group and UC Berkeley's Millennium group began to work
together on on the then newly-formed NPACI clusters project exactly three
years ago this month," Papadopoulos said. NPACI Rocks was the outgrowth of
this collaboration, and the first public release was six months later at the
SC2000 conference. "Over these three years, our goal has been to make
clusters easy to deploy, manage, upgrade, and scale."
"Typical NPACI Rocks users aren't cluster experts, they're smart people who
need clusters as tools to do their jobs," said Greg Bruno, a researcher in the
group. "A scientist who uses a Beowulf cluster shouldn't have to take up a
second career in system administration. That's why we've automated NPACI Rocks
to the point where only a handful of simple steps is required to bring up a
full-featured cluster."
"The Rocks Register is completely voluntary," Papadopoulos said, "and we know
that we have more users and more processors administered by our software than
the list implies. In fact, we'd like to encourage people out there who are
running NPACI Rocks to sign up, just so we can gauge where our development
efforts would be best spent."
"We tried several clustering alternatives before settling on Rocks as our
default system two years ago," said computational chemist Frederick P. Arnold,
Jr. of Northwestern University, who manages a 64-bit Itanium2 system and two
32-bit clusters with NPACI Rocks. "It has proven easy to install, configure,
extend, and use. It is extremely robust in production, and now forms the core
computing environment for Northwestern Chemistry's Theory Group. It also
evangelizes well to other groups once they see it in operation."
The Linux Competency Centre at Singapore Computer Systems (SCS-LCC) has set up
a new 60-processor Itanium2 cluster for the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) at
the National University of Singapore to support projects ranging from
computational fluid dynamics to bio-engineering. About 50 SMA researchers and
post-graduate students use the system.
"The team took less than a day to install the cluster with Rocks and getting
the cluster operational," said Laurence Liew, manager of the SCS Linux
Competency Centre. "This is a testimony to the amount of work that has gone
into making Rocks one of the best and easiest to use cluster toolkits in the
world."
NPACI Rocks is attractive to system administrators not only because it easy to
use, but also because the terms of its open-source Berkeley Software
Distribution (BSD) license mean that it's available to many users without
charge.
"In the past several months the use of NPACI Rocks has really accelerated,"
said SDSC software engineer Federico Sacerdoti. "We've heard that some big
systems will be announced in the near future, and I wouldn't be at all
surprised if the register hit an aggregate of 25 or 30 teraflops by the end of
this summer."
NPACI Rocks is developed by SDSC and partners at the University of California,
Berkeley, Singapore Computing Systems, and individual open-source software
developers. For more information on NPACI Rocks, see rocks.npaci.edu/.
The NPACI Rocks Register is at www.rocksclusters.org/rocks-register/.
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