The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Coders tool up for 10 petaflop Blue Waters super

supercomputer

SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois has published an interview with professor Laxmikant Kale, who is helping scientists tune their applications for the 10 Petaflop Blue Waters supercomputer that will come online sometime in 2011.

That's no small problem since the hardware doesn't yet exist.

The distinguishing feature of Charm++ and Adaptive MPI is that the programmer does not have to worry about the number of processors, the programmer doesn't write to the processors. Instead they break the simulation into data and work units, and then the runtime system assigns those to the processors. This gives the system flexibility to deal with issues like dynamic load balancing and automatic fault tolerance, without the programmer having to do anything about it.

For a machine as big as Blue Waters, doing an accurate code simulation would simply take too long on conventional hardware. Instead, Kale helps users run an emulation and record all the dependencies between computation blocks and messages. This allows them to identify bugs in a program that appear only at scale.

Read the full story.

This article was first published at Inside HPC.

Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner

More from The Register

SCO vs. IBM battle resumes over ownership of Unix
Zombie lawsuit back and wants to suck the brains out of Linux
 breaking news
You don't need phone lines or cable for ANYTHING, says Dish
The satellite-dish man can sort you out with phone and broadband over the air too
 breaking news
What's HP got under wraps? Looks awfully flash and tape shaped
What happens in Vegas won't stay there - we've got the details
Microsoft borks botnet takedown in Citadel snafu
Stupid Redmond kicked over our honeypots, wail white hats
IBM's $1bn layoffs latest: Now axe swings in US, Canada - reports
Union claims 121 storage bods canned after dismal sales
NetApp musters muscular cluster bluster for ONTAP busters
Storage array OS overhauled to juggle more nodes, go down on you, er, less
HP adds 'Haswell' Xeon E3s to entry ProLiant servers
Gussies up MicroServer for SMBs, adds baby switches