Guy Tel-Zur's Blog

Forget about LINPACK and FLOP/s. It is the skin that matters. The next big thing should be the "Top500 Skin" ranking. Here are my top five:       Corollaries: 1. As can be seen the US maintains its dominance. 2. All vendors can try harder. How about consulting Italian car designers? 3. SC20 should take place at the Museum of Modern Art.

RaspberryPi , a $35 toy or the next disruptive technology and a possible building block for HPC ? This credit card sized board has a ARM11 processor and 512MB RAM. The board is powered via a micro USB connector. It has two built-in USB sockets, Ethernet and HDMI video. A schematic drawing of model B which I have can be found here . I installed  Raspbian  Linux, an optimized Debian version for Raspberry, on a 4GB SD card. A cool gadget for triggering thoughts about the future of computing. Enclosed below a few pictures I took, enjoy!

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 ) :