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Clusters Rule! (SMPs DRUEL!)

Clusters Rule! (SMPs DRUEL!). David R. White Sandia National Labs. Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000. Questions?.

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Clusters Rule! (SMPs DRUEL!)

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  1. Clusters Rule!(SMPs DRUEL!) David R. White Sandia National Labs Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company,for the United States Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.

  2. Questions? 2 /2

  3. SGI is DEAD • Purchased last great dinosaur at Sandia last year: • 256 GB of Memory • NO New Graphics pipes (used old ones) • New Graphics pipes performance (measured through Ensight) was terrible (AGP 1X???) • Reason for purchase WAS NOT VIS but rather commodity and in-house meshing and older post-processing data scripts/tools. • Itaniums are NOT commodity (multi-thousands of $$ for a cpu is NOT commodity) 3

  4. Cluster Computing is Here • Recent introspective Sandia Engineering review said the best thing to come from ASC(I) has been robust, routine, parallel computing. In particular they called out Sandia’s local cluster resources as “wonderful”. • Same people who told us, “Go away, who would want anything more than a Cray Jedi vector super-computer?” • Same people who scoffed at notion of a shared graphics resource (SGI). • Clusters are easy!: Families are going to be building a new one at Sandia’s Family Day (mid-May). • Dynamic partitioning already exists in vis: Zoltan (Open Source), D3 (in VTK) (applied to Ensight even…). 4

  5. Vis Clusters are ready for prime… • Software is ready. ParaView, Visit and soon to be Ensight, right Bob? • Vis Clusters can or don’t have to have graphics cards (depends on if you can spare ~$500 per graphics node) and if you want 10X speed up over mesa (but you don’t HAVE to have them). • Graphics cards are NOT being driven by us (unlike the dinosaurs of the past). Ask my 10 and 8 year old boys… • ParaView rule of thumb: 1 million unstructured elements per graphics node 5

  6. Vis on Clusters Work • 264 Node Infiniband/Quadro 3400/PCI-E Cluster • 256 Nodes for LLNL Iso-Surface • 1.5 Billion Tri/Sec on 128 Nodes. • Remote Image Delivery over 100 MB Ethernet • Native, unaltered (none of Ken’s hardware specials) ParaView • (See Dino’s Talk) 6

  7. What should we be talking about? • Where should the graphics nodes go (stand-alone cluster or integrated on the main compute cluster)? • Why do we have CAVES/RAVES and Tiled Displays? • Okay, sorry about that one, rephrase: • What are the “right” use cases for CAVES/RAVES and Tiled Displays? • Where’s the “info” in sci-vis? • How do you visualize uncertainty? • Where are the psychologists/cognitive scientists? • When would you ever use anything but VTK? • Is web-based visualization an oxymoron? • Will Java ever be used for anything useful in the vis community? If so, why? 7

  8. For tomorrow’s discussion… Top Ten Ways to Really Tick-Off Vis Users • Work on volume rendering before they have a tool with which they can pick elements and nodes… • Work on gpu solutions when there are no good time/history plotting solutions • Build a really big tiled display before they have desktop tools and then charge them to use it… • Have the help button on the tool say, “Ya, right!” • Give them a tool that makes them connect to a license server • Not pay the license fees for a tool they are using because we want them to change tools • Work on visualization of 7th order polynomial elements when few even use quadratic tetrahedrals (and have a big meeting to show them all your cool work!) • Install really cool stereo monitors, bertha monitors and really expensive computers in common areas for people to see how much $$ the vis group has. • Buy everyone in the vis group the new ultra cool 30” apple cinema monitors. • Tell the customers you “would” work on a simple to use vis tool, BUT you got bored with it and went back to volume rendering! 8

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