Resources

1. Experimental Computing Laboratory (ExCL)
2. Future Technologies Colloquium Series
3. Publications
4. Call for papers
5. Visitor Information page (maps, lodging information, restaurants)
6. Jobs
7. CSM FT Home Page
8. Software

Staff

1. Sadaf Alam
2. David Bader (joint with Georgia Institute of Technology)
   
3. Micah Beck (joint with University of Tennessee-Knoxville)
   
4. Tammy Darland (Group Secretary)
5. Collin McCurdy
6. Jeremy Meredith
7. Kenneth Roche
8. Philip Roth
9. Thomas Sterling (joint with Louisiana State University)
10. Olaf Storaasli
11. Jeffrey Vetter (Group Leader)
12. Weikuan Yu

Visitors

1. Charles Lively
2. Heike Jagode
3. Srinivas Sridharan

Research

1. Early Evaluation of HPC Systems
2. Emerging Architectures
3. Parallel IO
4. Productive Programming Environments
5. Performance Prediction and Analysis
6. System Software
7. Visualization

News

2008-03-31  --  FT Demonstrates High Performance InfiniBand on Wide-Area Networks.  FT group members Weikuan Yu and Jeffrey Vetter, along with Nageswara Rao (also of Computer Science and Mathematics at ORNL), will be presenting their recent analysis results on high performance InfiniBand on wide-area networks in the 2008 IEEE Network, Architecture and Storage conference in Chongqing, China. Using the OC192 SONET connections from UltraScience Net, they have demonstrated that a network-level bandwidth of 7.4Gbps and an MPI-level bandwidth of 758MB/sec are achievable across two InfiniBand clusters that are 8600 miles apart. Part of results will also be presented in the OpenFabrics Conference in Sonoma, California.  

2008-02-29  --  FT IO team releases its optimized MPI-IO driver for Lustre as a part of MVAPICH.  The IO working team of the Future Technologies group has released its optimized MPI-IO driver for Lustre as part of MVAPICH-1.0, the popular MPI package from the Ohio State University, Network-Based Computing Laboratory. This release enables Lustre stripe-aligned high performance parallel I/O for scientific benchmarks and applications such as NAS BT-IO and FLASH I/O applications. Further info on code download, installation, and performance is available on MVAPICH website. The initial package was developed for use on the Cray XT system at ORNL.  

2008-02-28  --  FT Reports on Low-Overhead Virtualization and Light-Weight Migration of HPC Parallel I/O using Xen and PVFS.  FT group members Weikuan Yu and Jeffrey S. Vetter will be presenting their paper "A parallel I/O perspective for Xen-Based HPC" at the Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid, in Lyon, France. The paper presents an analysis of HPC parallel I/O in a virtualized environment. Using a PVFS-based virtual cluster, the team has analyzed the overheads and migration costs for parallel I/O programs in a Xen-based virtual machine cluster over two different networking protocols: TCP-based Gigabit Ethernet and VMM-bypass InfiniBand. The authors demonstrated that Xen-based HPC environment can support high performance parallel I/O with negligible overheads, and the migration of parallel I/O programs will add little cost to the total execution time.  

2008-02-28  --  FT Investigation on Characterization and Optimization of Large-Scale Parallel I/O on Jaguar.  FT group members Weikuan Yu and Jeffrey S. Vetter, along with Sarp Oral of the NCCS Technology Integration group, will be presenting their paper "Performance Characterization and Optimization of Parallel I/O on the Cray XT" at the 22nd IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium in Miami, Florida. The paper presents an extensive characterization, tuning, and optimization of parallel I/O on the Cray XT supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This characterization covers both data- and metadata-intensive I/O patterns. The authors shed light on the effectiveness of several parallel I/O techniques, such as data sieving and two-phase collective I/O, on the Cray XT. Moreover, the authors have demonstrated that it is possible, and often prudent, to improve the I/O performance of scientific benchmarks and applications by carefully optimizing their application's I/O operations. For example, they show that the I/O performance of the S3D combustion application can be improved at large scale by tuning the I/O system to avoid a bandwidth degradation of 49% with 8192 processes when compared to 4096 processes.  

2008-02-27  --  FT investigation reveals popular scientific benchmarks do not accurately represent TLB behaviors of real applications.  FT group members Collin McCurdy and Jeff Vetter, along with Alan Cox of Rice University, will be presenting their paper "Investigating the TLB Behavior of High-end Scientific Applications on Commodity Microprocessors," in Austin, TX this April at the 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS’08). The paper is the culmination of work, undertaken as part of the PetaSSI FastOS project, seeking to understand the TLB behavior of scientific applications. The analysis shows that two benchmark suites that are understood to represent scientific application behavior (SPEC CPU and HPCC) are not representative of the TLB behavior of important full scale applications. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates that false conclusions drawn from benchmark TLB performance can have significant ramifications for application performance.  

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