Guy Tel-Zur's Blog

The Internet is becoming impossible ... Very sad

The slides of my talk at the  HPC Advisory Council Israel Supercomputing Conference 2012 that took place on February 7th, 2012 at Tel-Aviv university are available from here . The Importance of High-Performance and High-Throughput Computing in Israel

I tested the new HPC Europa Milestone 6 DVD and created a virtual cluster using VirtualBox on my laptop. I created a head-node and two computing nodes connected via a VLAN.  The head node has two network interfaces, NAT which enables the connection to the outside world and an internal virtual interface. The two computing nodes have only one network interface each for the VLAN. In picture number 1 the VirtualBox dashboard is shown with the 3 running computers Picture number 1: The VirtualBox dashboard showing the 3 running computers of the virtual cluster Picture number 2: The desktop of the head node (left) and the two computing nodes (right) In picture number two a PBS job executing a simple MPI task is demonstrated. The head node is on the left and the two computing nodes are on the right. My general impression is that this Virtual Cluster is an excellent tool for education where the teacher and later on the students can experience Parallel Processing using the...

I tested globus-provision which is an easy way to have a globus+condor cluster ready for number crunching on Amazon’s EC2 cloud. My front end was my laptop which runs Windows. Python on Windows does not behave exactly as on Linux when it comes to SIGINT and therefore os.fork() generated an error message. Thanks to the support of  Borja Sotomayor the SIGINT issues has resolved and the solution was to by-pass the SIGINT so I could proceed with the test. You can read more about this issue from here: http://jira.globus.org/browse/GP-13?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel I tried the example from: http://globus.org/provision/guide_compute_go.html#guide-compute-go I decided not to use globusonline for the eBooks transfer and I used wget instead. Below are a few screen captures that show the test. My configuration file:  Preparing the instance: after a minute or two: checking the instance: Watching my cluster at the AWS management ...

A year ago almost no one knew this term. With a doubling time of less than 6 months "Big Data" is becoming a hot hype, as can be seen below (by  Google Trends ) :

About four years ago I predicted in this blog the fall of Grid Computing and the rise of Cloud Computing (  http://telzur.blogspot.com/2007/10/end-of-grid-computing.html  ) Now I want to claim that Supercomputers as we know them today will not be the kind we will see in the future. I think that within a couple of years: 1. Most supercomputers will shift to the cloud (HPC Cloud). 2. The governance of X86 is not guaranteed: We already see the rise of GPGPUs and we will see more families of technologies being involved, e.g. Tegra and ARM, Reconfigureable Computing (RC) i.e. FPGAs, etc'. 3. Supercomputers won't be anymore General Purpose machines. They will be reconstructed as a Cloud Service ( Supercomputing as a Service ) from all the available technologies (see previous section) per single mission (program) in order to maximize the performance and minimize the consumed energy and cost. I decided to use the word mission because the word  task is u...

Congratulations! Cloud Computing turns 15, don't believe? check this link. The original article is by Technology Review , check here