NUG Training 1032005

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NUG Training 10/3/2005

• Logistics
• Morning only coffee and snacks
• Additional drinks 0.50 in refrigerator in small
  kitchen area can easily go out to get coffee
  during 15-minute breaks
• Parking garage vouchers at reception desk on
  second floor
• Lunch
• On your own, but can go out in groups

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Todays Presentations

• Jacquard Introduction
• Jacquard Nodes and CPUs
• High Speed Interconnect and MVAPICH
• Compiling
• Running Jobs
• Software overview
• Hands-on
• Machine room tour

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Overview of Jacquard Richard Gerber NERSC User
Services RAGerber_at_lbl.gov NERSC Users
Group October 3, 2005 Oakland, CA
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Presentation Overview

• Cluster overview
• Connecting
• Nodes and processors
• Node interconnect
• Disks and file systems
• Compilers
• Operating system
• Message passing interface
• Batch system and queues
• Benchmarks and application performance

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Status

• Status Update

Jacquard has been experiencing node
failures. While this problem is being worked on
we are making Jacquard available to users in a
degraded mode. About 200 computational nodes are
available, one login node, and about half of the
storage nodes that support the GPFS file
system. Expect lower than usual I/O
performance. Because we may still experience some
instability, users will not be charged until
Jacquard is returned to full production
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Introduction to Jacquard

• Named in honor of inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard,
  whose loom was the first machine to use punch
  cards to control a sequence of operations.
• Jacquard is a 640-CPU Opteron cluster running a
  Linux operating system.
• Integrated, delivered, and supported by Linux
  Networx
• Jacquard has 320 dual-processor nodes available
  for scientific calculations. (Not dual-core
  processors.)
• The nodes are interconnected with a high-speed
  InfiniBand network.
• Global shared file storage is provided by a GPFS
  file system.

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Jacquard

• http//www.nersc.gov/nusers/resources/jacquard/

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Jacquard Characteristics
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Jacquards Role

• Jacquard is meant to be for codes that do not
  scale well on Seaborg.
• Hope to relieve Seaborg backlog.
• Typical job expected to be in the concurrency
  range of 16-64 nodes.
• Applications typically run 4X Seaborg speed. Jobs
  that cannot scale to large parallel concurrency
  should benefit from faster CPUs.

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Connecting to Jacquard

• Interactive shell access is via SSH.
• ssh l login_name jacquard.nersc.gov
• Four login nodes for compiling and launching
  parallel jobs. Parallel jobs do not run on login
  nodes.
• Globus file transfer utilities can be used.
• Outbound network services are open (e.g., ftp).
• Use hsi for interfacing with HPSS mass storage.

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Nodes and processors

• Each jacquard node has 2 processors that share 6
  GB of memory. OS/network/GPFS uses 1 (?) GB of
  that.
• Each processor is a 2.2 GHz AMD Opteron
• Processor theoretical peak 4.4 GFlops/sec
• Opteron offers advanced 64-bit processor,
  becoming widely used in HPC.

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Node Interconnect

• Nodes are connected by an InfiniBand high speed
  network from Mellanox.
• Adapters and switches from Mellanox
• Low latency 7µs vs. 25 µs on Seaborg
• Bandwidth 2X Seaborg
• Fat tree

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Disks and file systems

• Homes, scratch, and project directories are in
  global file system from IBM, GFPS.
• SCRATCH environment variable is defined to
  contain path to a users personal scratch space.
• 30 TBytes total usable disk
• 5 GByte space, 15,000 inode quota in HOME per
  user
• 50 GByte space, 50,000 inode quota in SCRATCH
  per user
• SCRATCH gives better performance, but may be
  purged if space is needed

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Project directories

• Project directories are coming (some are already
  here).
• Designed to facilitate group sharing of code and
  data.
• Can be repo- or arbitrary group-based
• /home/projects/group
• For sharing group code
• /scratch/projects/group
• For sharing group data and binaries
• Quotas TBD

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Compilers

• High performance Fortran/C/C compilers from
  Pathscale.
• Fortran compiler pathf90
• C/C compiler pathcc, pathCC
• MPI compiler scripts use Pathscale compilers
  underneath and have all MPI I, -L, -l options
  already defined
• mpif90
• mpicc
• mpicxx

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Operating system

• Jacquard is running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise
  Linux 9
• Has all the usual Linux tools and utilities
  (gcc, GNU utilities, etc.)
• It was the first enterprise-ready Linux for
  Opteron.
• Novell (indirectly) provides support and product
  lifetime assurances (5 yrs).

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Message passing interface

• MPI implementation is known as MVAPICH.
• Based on MPICH from Argonne with additions and
  modifications from LBNL for InfiniBand. Developed
  and supported ultimately by Mellanox/Ohio State
  group.
• Provides standard MPI and MPI/IO functionality.

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Batch system

• Batch scheduler is PBS Pro from Altair
• Scripts not much different from LoadLeveler _at_
  -gt PBS
• Queues for interactive, debug, premium charge,
  regular charge, low charge.
• Configured to run jobs using 1-128 nodes (1-256
  CPUs).

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Performance and benchmarks

• Applications run 4x Seaborg, some more, some less
  
• NAS Parallel Benchmarks (64-way) are 3.5-7
  times seaborg
• Three applications the author has examined (-O3
  out of the box)
• CAM 3.0 (climate) 3.5 x Seaborg
• GTC (fusion) 4.1 x Seaborg
• Paratec (materials) 2.9 x Seaborg

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User Experiences

• Positives
• Shorter wait in the queues
• Linux many codes already run under Linux
• Good performance for 16-48 node jobs some codes
  scale better than on Seaborg
• Opteron is fast

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User Experiences

• Negatives
• Fortran compiler is not common, so some porting
  issues.
• Small disk quotas.
• Unstable at times.
• Job launch doesnt work well (cant pass ENV
  variables).
• Charge factor.
• Big endian I/O.

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Todays Presentations

• Jacquard Introduction
• Jacquard Nodes and CPUs
• High Speed Interconnect and MVAPICH
• Compiling
• Running Jobs
• Software overview
• Hands-on
• Machine room tour

23
Hands On

• We have a special queue blah with 64 nodes
  reserved.
• You may work on your own code.
• Try building and running test code
• Copy to your directory and untar
  /scratch/scratchdirs/ragerber/NUG.tar
• 3 NPB parallel benchmarks ft, mg, sp
• Configure in config/make.def
• make ft CLASSC NPROCS16
• Sample PBS scripts in run/
• Try new MPI version, opt levels, -g, IPM