Slashdot Mirror
"Cplant" Parallel Computing Tool
SEWilco writes "Sandia National Laboratories has released its "Cplant" massively parallel processing software. This is related to the software used in their ASCI Red supercomputer, and eliminates several scalability problems to allow hundreds of nodes for algorithms which can't be parallelized for Beowulf-type clusters. This is now number 2 on the TOP500 supercomputer list. The press release refers to "licensing terms", but the license is the GPL.
We discussed this in a Linux clusters discussion and several earlier reports as ASCI Red grew."
A standalone non-clustered one of these.
In order to simulate new weapons configurations, it takes an awful lot of computing power. Just try to imagine all the factors that have to be tracked and taken into account in order to produce an accurrate and thorough simulation. Simulated tests have a lot of advantages, obvious (no radiation) and non-obvious (costs).
You've been reading YRO too much. Trust me. The government has a lot better uses to put its supercomputers to than breaking our SSH and PGP keys--like big guns and bombs for laying waste to the known world!
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
I've never worked in one of the supercomputer-happy departments at Sandia, but here's a few applications I've talked with others about:
Nuclear simulation: This is the big one. With popular opinion and world politics the way it is, it's likely we won't set off another thermonuclear detonation for a very long time. Unfortunately, we have a few thousand warheads that are aging and decaying, and we want to be sure (and make everyone else sure) that our final deterrent isn't turning into duds under our noses. This is pretty much the sole official justification for the national labs' supercomputing programs.
More nuclear simulation: After New Mexico's devastating summer fires last year, they stepped up research on the effects of fire on stored warheads (no, they won't go nuclear, but cleanup could still be awful). Simulating something that turbulent isn't easy, but it'll be nice to know if there are any further precautions Los Alamos needs to take.
Computational Fluid Dynamics - refining supercomputer code to cut down on the need for even more expensive wind tunnel time. Military and civilian uses: the two I saw were hypersonic parachute unfolding for bombers and drag-reducing plastic attachments for big rig trucks.
Impact testing - this is one of the big commercial apps of supercomputers; I don't know how much of it they're doing at Sandia right now. You can make vehicles a lot more crash safe cheaply if you can virtually destroy them (and refine their frame designs) hundreds of times before actually mangling hardware.
As for crypto breaking... no. For example, the Teraflops has 9 or 10,000 processors (just upgraded to 3xx Mhz Xeons, I'm told, since those are the fastest things that could be massaged into the old PPro sockets) - That's on the order of how many distributed net computers brute forced 64 bit encryption... so for 128 bit encryption you'd just need 16 quintillion more Teraflops supercomputers. Your PGP key is infinitely more likely to be snagged by some hacker's trojan and keylogger than it is by a government supercomputer.
Although this sounds good for Linux, now in the number 2 most powerful computer in the world. Another sign that Linux is on the rise and not "dead"
I don't see a reference to Linux in the description of this supercomputer. I see the following link to the specs which describes the OS as:
The operating system used for the Service, I/O, and System Partitions is Intel's distributed version of UNIX (POSIX 1003.1 and XPG3, AT&T System V.3 and 4.3 BSD Reno VFS) developed for the Paragon XP/S Supercomputer. The Paragon OS presents a single system image to the user. This means that users see the system as a single UNIX machine despite the fact that the operating system is running on a distributed collection of nodes.
As much as I like to push Linux (I use it as my desktop) it just isn't correct to say it is in the #2 in the top 500 list.
I like where they say TCP/IP has inherent scalability limitations. Have they heard of the Internet?
--
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I always wondered what big brother does with these super computers, the FAQ says little about what tasks these perform, and I doubt you would need that much supercomputing for research.
So the question is, just what is Sandia doing with this? Making super comps to crack codes perhaps for the NSA? Aside from that maybe some sole company should look into recovering the hundreds of obsolete PC's that are being tossed and create a super comp to test with and perhaps create the ultimate crypto algorithm. (Yes I know slightly off topic)
Does anyone have any idea as to what these machines are truly doing?
Want Root?
Now that they've been "un-bought", Cray gets to put its name back on the list as an independent company.
As a side note, SGI sold the Cray division because it was "unprofitible" and a fiscal liability. Yet, Cray Inc. made a profit last quarter, and SGI has lost about $2/share for the last several quarters in a row, and just layed off another 1/3 of their workforce. Oh, and Cray's stock price is higher. Go fig. :)
And, I quote: "This is related to the software used in their ASCI Red supercomputer, and eliminates several scalability problems to allow hundreds of nodes for algorithms which can't be parallelized for Beowulf-type clusters." This is a pretty big over-statement. From exploring their site, it seems pretty clear that, while they made a few scalability enhancements (like cutting out the TCP/IP stuff, etc), they're main goal was to make large commodity cluster systems (Beowulf or not) more usable. They made a lot of good progress in this area by porting over several tools from their learning experience with ASCI Red. I also found it funny that their "commodity machine" had a custom-made myrinet switch. I think it must be hard to resist the "if we don't have it, we'll build it" mentality of a National Lab. Very cool. Oh, and I'm not sure when the source was put up, but from what I can tell, the site hasn't been updated in almost a year.
This is great stuff. This is similar to what the commercial applications Ab Initio and Torrent Orchestrate do. What this software does is provide a standardized, consistent worldview of the all the resources in your parallel system. It should allow you to partition data, pass out processes to nodes, and handle internode communication between them transparently.
:-)
This is an important software release, because it is a step away from hand rolled, low level message passing, toward a standarized means of communicaton between nodes at a much higher level of abstraction. Think of it this way: You don't want to have to write all of the control logic for processes that are divvied out to the nodes when you are writing an application. Instead, you provide base classes of behaviour, distribute them to all of the nodes, and then inherit and instantiate specialized behaviors for _EACH JOB_ from a control partition.
This provides a nice level of abstraction for the programmer. It also puts Linux MPP systems in the same class as your IBM SP/2, NCR/Teradata, and Clustered Solaris systems, among others. I think that I will be doing some work on enhancing this software!
Oh, and yes, I do professional parallel programming for a living.
Cheers and kudos to Sandia for releasing this as GPL!!!
~Religion is O.K., as long as it gets you laid.
Cray, Inc. is much more alive than their former owner, SGI...
Lots of new products and they're even making a profit.
http://www.cray.com/products/systems.
Nice varitey of systems, from their own SV1/SV1ex/SV2 machines, to Linux clusters, to maspar Alphas, to NEC vector-based machines, and more.
here! Enjoy!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
Will the x86-optimised ASCI Red BLAS, FFT and Extended Precision libraries also be open-sourced and licensed under the GPL instead of the binary-only releases to-date?
Scroogle