Fora o nervosismo e calorão que senti, mesmo com a temperatura estando por volta do 10 graus Celsius Porto Alegre, e que achei estranho pois já fiz apresentações para um público mais numeroso, a palestra foi muito legal (pelo menos no meu ponto de vista ). O único problema que tive foi com o tempo, pois com os 40 minutos de apresentação estipulados não consegui mostrar na prática os fontes de MPI, PThreads, OpenMP e X10 que havia preparado para a sessão.

Aproveitando que disponibilizei os arquivos pelo DropBox, clique em [3] para criar sua conta lá se ainda não tiver a sua!

[1] http://miud.in/8sf
[2] http://miud.in/8sg
[3] https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTYyODM2NjA5

O interessante dessa nova lista foram as outras posições, entre a segunda e a décima, dessa vez dominada pela Cray Inc. Diferentemente da última lista (comentada por mim aqui), onde a IBM tinha cinco dos Top10, dessa vez a Cray Inc. tem quatro delas: #2 – Jaguar XT5, #7 – Franklin, #8 Jaguar XT4 e #9 – Red Storm. As outras posições foram: #3 – Pleiades (SGI), #4 – BlueGene/L (IBM), #5 – BlueGene/P (IBM), #6 – Ranger (Sun Microsystems) e #10 – Dawning 5000A (Dawning).

O Brasil tem dois representantes nesta lista. O melhor colocado é um Dell PowerEdge Cluster, chamado de Netuno, do Núcleo de Computação Eletrônica da UFRJ que ficou na posição #306, e o seguinte, que ficou na posição #363, é um IBM xSeries x3550 Cluster Xeon quad core HT da PGS.

Outro dado interessante é o contínuo crescimento do número de sistemas utilizando Linux. Nesta lista, foram 439 sistemas (acrescimo de 12 com relação a lista anterior) com sistema operacional da família Linux. É o pinguin dominando o mercado

Roadrunner, named after the New Mexico state bird, cost about US $100 million, and was designed and build by IBM at Los Alamos National Laboratory to the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. It is the world’s first hybrid supercomputer, designed to Cell Broadband Engine® works with the Opteron® processors from AMD. A few numbers of Roadrunner:

• connects 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron® chips as well as 12,240 Cell chips (on IBM Model QS22 blade servers),
• has 98 terabytes of memory,
  
• is housed in 278 refrigerator-sized, IBM BladeCenter® racks occupying 5,200 square feet,
• has 10,000 connections – both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet — that required 55 miles of fiber optic cable,
• weighs 500,000 lbs.

But other important thing about Roadrunner is its operating system: a Linux version from Red Hat. All the Top10 most powerful supercomputers have Linux. Four of them have only Linux running: #1 Roadrunner (IBM), #4 Ranger (Sun Microsystems), #5 Jaguar (Cray Inc.), #7 Encanto (SGI), #8 EKA (Hewlett-Packard) and #10 Total’s SGI Altix (SGI). The rest of them have a kind of mixed system (Linux+something): #2 BlueGene/L (IBM), #3 Argonne Blue Gene/P Solution (IBM), #6 JUGENE Blue Gene/P Solution (IBM) and #9 IDRIS Blue Gene/P Solution (IBM) have SLES9+CNK.

The number of supercomputers with Linux have increased by the years. From the 500 supercomputers of the last list, 427 have Linux and 40 have a mixed system with Linux (UNICOS/Linux, CNK/SLES 9, UNICOS/SUSE Linux and UNICOS/lc). See the official numbers here. The first time that a supercomputer with Linux appeared in the Top500 list was on June,1998. The development of the Linux usage by the years can be visualized here.

Roadrunner, nome de uma ave do estado do Novo Mexico nos EUA, custou cerca de 100 milhões de dólares, e foi projetado e construido pela IBM no Laboratório Nacional Los Alamos para a Departamento de Energia. Ele é o primeiro supercomputador híbrido do mundo, projetado para processador Cell Broadband Engine® trabalhar em conjunto com o processador Opteron® da AMD. Alguns números do Roadrunner:

• conecta 6562 chips dual-core AMD Opteron® bem como 12.240 chips Cell (em servidores blades IBM Modelo QS22),
• tem 98 terabytes de memória,
  
• está em 278 IBM BladeCenter® racks ocupando 483.095 m²t,
• tem 10.000 conexões – ambas Infiniband e Gigabit Ethernet — que requiseram 88,5 Km de cabos de fibra óptica,
• pesa cerca de 227 toneladas.

Mas um fato interessante sobre o Roadrunner é seu sistema operacional: uma versão de Linux da Red Hat. Todos os Top10 supercomputadores mais poderosos usam Linux. Quatro deles tem somente Linux: #1 Roadrunner (IBM), #4 Ranger (Sun Microsystems), #5 Jaguar (Cray Inc.), #7 Encanto (SGI), #8 EKA (Hewlett-Packard) e #10 SGI Altix da Total (SGI). O resto possuem um tipo de sistema misto (Linux+alguma coisa): #2 BlueGene/L (IBM), #3 Argonne Blue Gene/P Solution (IBM), #6 JUGENE Blue Gene/P Solution (IBM) e #9 IDRIS Blue Gene/P Solution (IBM) todos com SLES9+CNK.

O número de supercomputadores com Linux tem crescido através dos anos. Dos 500 supercomputadores da última lista, 427 rodam Linux e 40 tem um sistema misto com Linux (UNICOS/Linux, CNK/SLES 9, UNICOS/SUSE Linux and UNICOS/lc). Veja os números oficiais aqui. A primeira vez que um supercomputador com Linux apareceu na lista Top500 foi em Junho de 1998. O crescimento do uso de Linux através dos anos em supercomputadores pode ser visto aqui.

Update: Curiosamente, Roadrunner é nome americano do personagem Papa-Léguas da animação Papa-Léguas e Coiote. Os nomes dos personagens da animação são baseados em nome de animais reais nativos dos desertos do sudoeste americano, o galo-corredor e o coiote.

Ok, everyone has heard about the Top500 list, a twice year list of the sites operating the 500 most powerful supercomputers systems of the world. The first list is commonly announced during the International SuperComputing Conference – ISC (June), and the second during the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis – SC (November).

The first position of the last list (released on November 12th, 2007) is the BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) that was installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. The No. 2 is from IBM too, a BlueGene/P system installed in Germany at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ). From the Top10, there are four IBM’s systems, and 46.6% of the 500 systems are IBM.

And about the Green500 list, who’s know it? The Green500 provides a ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world and serve as a complementary view to the Top500 list. The first list was announced on November 15th, 2007 at SC07, and we can see the rank here.

But why is it important to IBM? Because the numbers!! From the first until the 27th position, only the No. 6 is not from IBM. The first five systems are Blue Gene/P Solution, and from the No. 7 until the No. 27 they are eServer Blue Gene Solutions.

This is a clear result of the green concern that IBM is involved.

There were very nice presentations like the “Computational Characteristics of Production Seismic Migration and its Performance on Novel Processor Architectures” by Jairo Panetta (Petróleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil), “Impacts of Multiprocessor Configurations on Workloads in Bioinformatics” by Mauricio Breternitz (Intel Corporation, USA) and the Google Keynote presentation.

The event had many parallel Workshops and the most famous of them are the WSCAD (Workshop em Sistemas Computacionais de Alto Desempenho – Workshop in High Performance Computing Systems). This is a portuguese event, so I think that is not interesting point the presentations here, but there was a good CELL programming short course.

Summarizing the event I can point three things discussed in the keynotes and panels, to solve the problem of the new challenges of parallel and multi-core programming:

1. Use high level programming languages;
2. Use tools developed to do the work of parallelling the code;
3. Raise the level of abstraction of the problem.

These three points of view are defended by Kunle Olukotun (Stanford University), Mauricio Bareternitz (Intel) and Laxmikant (Sanjay) Kale (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), respectively.