Guy Tel-Zur's Blog

I saw lots of traffic in the Internet dealing with the question if it possible to upgrade Canon PowerShot S3 IS memory card beyond 2GB. I can report, from my personal experience, that this camera accepts and works well with SanDisk SDHC 4GB card. The exact product packing is shown in the photo below (which is in low quality because it was taken by my cellular phone :) )

The next Israeli Association of Grid Technologies High-Performance Computing Work Group meeting 13:45-16: 0 0, January 20, 2010 IGT Office Maskit 4 Hertzeliya Agenda: 13:45-14:00 Opening by Avner Algom and Guy Tel-Zur 14:00-15:00 Prof. Tilo Wettig, Ph.D., University of Regensburg, Germany - The QPACE supercomputer (Live via Webex) 15:00-15:15 Coffee break 15:15-16:00 Dr. Guy Tel-Zur, IGT – Challenges in teaching Parallel Computing Program: 14:00-15:00 Prof. Tilo Wettig, Ph.D., University of Regensburg, Germany - The QPACE supercomputer Prof. Tilo Wettig will give an overview of the QPACE supercomputer, which was developed by a collaboration of several academic institutions and the IBM R&D lab Boeblingen, Germany. QPACE is a massively parallel architecture, allowing a single application to run on thousands of nodes. Individual nodes consist of a PowerXCell 8i processor and an FPGA that functions as network coprocessor. The nodes are connected in a 3-dimensional torus. The target...

There are many ways to use MPI. In this post I show how to install and use the DeinoMPI implementation which looks very cool and is free. The screen captures in this post were taken using the nice SnapIt tool. Part 1: Installing DeinoMPI After downloading and starting the msi file: Part 2: Configuring DeinoMPI 2.1 Start the deinoMPI daemon: 2.2 Credentials Part 3: Testing In this part I show how to compile a MPI program with the free Bloodshed DevC++ IDE . I use the famous cpi.c code This installation is "Local Only" (perhaps in one of my future posts I will show how to use this tool with more than one node): The Windows Firewall is noticing the new player: Here is the execution and output window: It is nice to see the Task Manager showing the 10 parallel running processes: Part 4: A little-bit Mathematics The integration in cpi.c is done for f(x)=1/(1+x**2) between 0 to 1. It is nice to replace this function by f(x)=sqrt(1-x**2) also between 0 to 1 (the unit circle). St...

[mpich-discuss] Errors while testing MPICH2 on Vista Guy Tel-Zur gtelzur at gmail.com Sat Oct 24 14:39:26 CDT 2009 Previous message: [mpich-discuss] MPI-3 Fortran feedback Next message: [mpich-discuss] MPI function to test a machine alive or not. Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] I am trying to test a fresh installation of MPICH2 (version 1.2) on Vista32 and get the following errors: c:\temp>"c:\Program Files\MPICH2\bin\mpiexec.exe" -n 4 cpi.exe Please specify an authentication passphrase for smpd: passphrase, e.g. behappy*> Error while connecting to host, No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. (10061) Connect on sock (host=user-PC, port=8676) failed, exhaused all end points Unable to connect to 'user-PC:8676', sock error: Error = -1 I will appreciate any comment. --Guy -------------- next...

The next IGT HPC Work Group meeting 14:00-16:30, November 4 th , 2009 IGT Office Maskit 4 Hertzeliya Agenda: 14:00-14:15 Welcome talk Avner and Guy 14:15-15:15 Mr. Lior Amar and Mr. Tal Maoz – Clusterlogic: CLiP & Infod -- HPC Cluster Management and Monitoring 15:15-15:30 Coffee break 15:30-16:30 Mr. Nadav Rotem, Haifa University - Introduction to Reconfigurable Computing Program: 14:15-15:15 CLiP & Infod -- HPC Cluster Management and Monitoring Mr. Lior Amar and Mr. Tal Maoz Abstract: ClusterLogic ( www.clusterlogic.net ) specializes in providing advanced solutions for HPC Linux clusters. In this talk we will present two of our products, aimed at making the task of cluster management and monitoring easier: CLiP CLiP is a Cluster Installation and Management system which enables the rapid installation of diskless (and diskfull) clients. It is very flexible and enables the administrator to setup multiple desired configuration with only a few clicks. The client nodes...

What are the chances that you will be found alive if you entered an Israeli train? Well, according to the recent Israeli trains accidents it is not high. Here are photos I took today of the train that went off the tracks near Kfar Menachem:

Cloud-based Services and Applications Chairs: Prof Mark Baker, University of Reading Dr. Marcel Kunze, Forschungszentrum, Karlsruhe Abstract Cloud computing is increasingly being used for what was known as “on-demand” and “utility computing”. The services provided, the APIs and the applications that can be hosted by these Cloud providers have superseded the use of the grid, and are increasingly becoming popular with users. There are obviously two sides to the services that are provided by Cloud providers: those that are supplied by commercial entities, such as Amazon and Google , as well as those that are open-source systems, such as provided by OpenCirrus and Eucalyptus . In this workshop we wish to examine and explore the services, interfaces and types of applications that can be executed on Cloud systems. In addition, we are interested in the interfaces used to access the underlying services, the pros/cons of using virtualisation, the range and scope of applicat...

Presenter Mordechai Butrashvily CEO Company for Advanced Supercomputing Solutions Ltd. Abstract This meeting will showcase NVIDIA library implementing various performance primitives on the GPU for various purposes, from image/video processing to other tasks. The library can be considered as the GPU equivalent of Intel IPP, although with functionality that is added with time. In the meeting we will overview the set of supported functions, test and discuss performance topics with regard to the GPU. Using this library, users can experience between x10 to x50 performance increases when compared to running on the CPU. This meeting will be followed by another, discussing upcoming LAPACK library implementation on the GPU. To reserve your place, please send your contact details to: info@grid.org.il

Miron Livny talking at the IGT event, July 15th, 2009. The presentation of Dhruba Borthakur about Hadoop and Condor is available here .

I enjoyed visiting today at Madison's Art Fair on the Square . You can see some photos I took in my Picasa album here .

Date: Jul 23, 2009 09:30 12:30 Location: Voltaire, 13 Zarchin St. Raanana Agenda Assaf Somekh VP Marketing & Strategic Alliances "New products and developments" Tom Thirer Fabric Management product manager will present "UFM: How to optimize performance with less operational efforts" Amit Katz Ethernet Platform product manager "10GbE in the HPC Market” Assaf Wachtel InfiniBand Platform product manager will present "40 Gb/s InfiniBand Switching Portfolio" Amit Katz Ethernet Platform product manager “ Accelerating Open MPI with InfiniBand or 10GbE ” To reserve your place, please send your contact details to: info@grid.org.il Date Jul 23, 2009 09:30 12:30 Location Voltaire, 13 Zarchin St. Raanana

Prof. Miron Livny The Head of the Condor project: Open Source for High Throughput Computing (HTC) http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/ Condor and the Cloud - The Challenges and the Roadmap of Condor The goal of the Condor® Project is to develop, implement, deploy, and evaluate mechanisms and policies that support High Throughput Computing (HTC) on large collections of distributively owned computing resources. Today, Condor is being used as a service in private clouds, Amazon EC2 and is embedded in Redhat Linux. Dhruba Borthakur Software Engineer at Facebook and Project Lead for Apache Hadoop File System Hadoop Distributed File System (including Hive) & Condor I discuss the design and architecture of the Hadoop Distributed File system. I then talk about configuration details about the private Hadoop Cloud used by Facebook to process petabytes of data. Date: July 15th, 2009 14:30-17:00 Location: Microsoft R&D Center, Hertzelia To reserve your place, please send your ...

In this post I will show step by step how to install and execute MPI (Message Passing Interface) parallel programs in the .NET environment. A much more detailed tutorial is available here . 1) Installation: My computer is running Windows Vista and Visual Studio 2008 is already installed. Download and install the HPC Pack 2008 (next 5 figures): Then install the MPI.NET SDK.msi (see next 4 figures): 2) Test the installation from the command line (next 3 figures): A "Ping-Pong" program Serial run: As should be, the firewall detects the communication traffic and the user should allow it: Parallel run: 3) MPI "Hello" demo using Visual Studio 2008 and C# (next 5 figures): Start a new console C# project: Add Reference to the MPI component: Build the executable: Execute the parallel program with 8 threads: Verifying the execution of the 8 threads by looking at the Task Manager: That's all for now. Your comments are welcome. Guy Tel-Zur Email: tel-zur@computer.org

I asked the two search engines about Quantum Gravity , see for yourself the results...

The IGT, Engineering Software Lab and Wolfram Research are happy to invite you to this interesting Mini Seminar on the subject of: Multiplying the Power of Mathematica 7 over the GRID (Plus an introduction to the new computational knowledge search engine Wolfram Alpha ) About the Speaker: Jon McLoone has worked with Wolfram Research, makers of Mathematica, since 1992 on software development, system design, technical writing, and strategy. He supports educational projects in cooperation with universities and government research, and has lectured on Mathematica around the world. McLoone has a degree in mathematics from Durham University, United Kingdom. A Video recording of a lecture on Mathematica Lightweight Grid systems by Jon can be viewed here: Using the Wolfram Lightweight Grid System The Seminar: Part 1 Multiplying the Power of Mathematica 7 over the GRID : An introduction to Grid Computing parallel computing and HPC with Mathematica 7 and gridMathematica Th...

Remember the Canonical Commutation Relation (Commutator) from Physics courses? Let's implement it on our two favorite terms: [Grids, Clouds] = Grids*Clouds-Clouds*Grids ≠ 0 This means that we can build Grids of Clouds and we can build Clouds of Grids and the final outcome will be different…. …So Distributed Computing exhibits Quantum and not Classical behavior :) In the near future we will see Clouds connected into a Grid and Grids that are implemented on top of a Cloud .

Following OnLive at GDC and others I would like to suggest the term GaaS to stand for Game as a Service . GaaS represents streaming games services that are delivered to end-users (with thin clients) by a Cloud Computing infastructure. Charging can be done according to a Pay-Per-Use model.

Israeli association for Grid Technologies (IGT) Cloud Investment Summit for Virtualization and Cloud/SaaS Based startups June 1st, 2009 Tel Aviv , Israel Innovate Faster with Cloud Computing Thanks to Cloud computing, the time it takes to bring a new product idea to market is shorter than ever before. Cloud computing helps startups to reduce the time and the cost to set-up and run R&D infrastructures. The immediate availability of unlimited computer resources expands the industry scope of R&D capabilities and improving the productivity and the profitability of the industry. Call for Startups Do you want to present your start-up to investors and CIOs? For 5 minutes the floor could be all yours. Impress the press, wow your audience and secure your investment! We want the best startups, so if you're working on something spectacular in the Cloud, Grid, Virtualization or SaaS, the floor can be yours. T...

After Gmail failure a few days ago, this is a red light warning to the Cloud Computing model that this technology is still not mature enough.

Monday, March 23 rd , 2009 IGT Offices, Maskit 4, 5th Floor, Hertzliya. 14:00-14:15: Gathering 14:15-14:30: Opening - Avner & Guy 14:30-15:25: Introduction to Intel Threading Tools 15:25-15:35: Coffee Break 15:35-16:25: ExaStore® Clustered NAS System 16:25-16:35: Discussion and concluding remarks Detailed Agenda: 14:30-15:25: Introduction to Intel Threading Tools Speaker: Dr. Ami Marowka, Department of Computer Science Bar-Ilan University Abstract Intel Threading tools, Thread Profiler and Thread Checker , allow performing correctness and performance checking on multi-threaded applications running on multicore systems. The parallelization method may be based on POSIX, Windows Threads, or on OpenMP. Thread Profiler is the tool which identifies bottlenecks that limit the parallel performance of your multi-threaded application, locates synchronization delays, stalled threads, excessive blocking time, and ineffective utilization...

Maple Workshop - Grid Computing Toolbox Monday, February 23 rd , 2009 14:00 - 17:00 IGT Offices, Maskit 4, 5th Floor, Hertzliya. 14:15-14:30: Opening - Avner & Guy 14:30-15:45: Maple – Part 1, Introduction to Maple 15:45-16:00: Coffee Break 16:00-17:00: Maple – Part 2, Maplesoft Parallel and Grid Computing Toolbox Detailed Agenda: 14:30-15:45: Maple – Part 1: Introduction to Maple Speaker: Omer Yagel, DigiSec LTD Abstract An Introduction to Maple 12 lecture Q&A Lecture's Content Easy start The document interface principles A brief on clickable math Efficient use of the help The Maple philosophy for efficient use Symbolism ODEs Integrals Matrices Naming the many other areas I have no time to show (graph theory, tensor calc...) Numerics Precision ODEs Matrices Internal NAG routines Graphics ...

I enjoyed attending the event which took place today at Tel Aviv University. It was encouraging to see the Bar-Shira Auditorium full of young people interested in Web Services and Cloud Computing. Enclosed 2 photos of Martin Buhr who gave a clear and interesting presentation about AWS.

Date Jan 21, 2009 15:00 17:00 Location IGT Offices, Maskit 4, 5th Floor, Hertzelia Speaker Mr. Stephane Bihan, CAPS Enterprises Abstract Programming for the GPU architecture and multi-core platforms can be a difficult task. Sometimes it prevents from good utilization of the platform and even programmers entering this field. For the aid of programmers, automatic tools can simplify most of the work: providing vectorization, parallelism and better register usage of the output. HMPP Workbench is a framework developed by CAPS Enterprises to help programmers make effective use of multi-core architectures, including the CPU, GPU and other accelerators (FPGA, etc.). HMPP provides compiler support for both C and FORTRAN environments. The meeting will present the features of HMPP, including a live demonstration of porting an algorithm to multi-core and GPU environments. To reserve your place, please email your details to: info@grid.org.il Thank you, IGT For further ...

I installed Windows-7 beta as a guest operating system of the SUN xVM on my Lenovo T-61 running Vista . The installation went smoothly although it required most of the available memory. A screen shot is enclosed. From reasons which I still don’t understand the network interface was not detected, so surfing the Internet was not possible during this test! (I have network connection when I run Suse 11 as a xVM client). While everyone look to the sky these days for Cloud Computing, Microsoft preferred to dive into the sea and to display a fish at the center of the desktop. Strange. I can’t say anything yet about stability and performance but my first impression is of a deja vu; More of the Same. Suse and Ubuntu are still my favorites. We shall see. (This post was written using Windows Live Writer)