Clusters Rule!(SMPs DRUEL!)

David R. WhiteSandia 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

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)

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…).

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

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)

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?

8

For tomorrow’s discussion…Top Ten Ways to Really Tick-Off Vis Users

1. Work on volume rendering before they have a tool with which they can pick elements and nodes…

2. Work on gpu solutions when there are no good time/history plotting solutions

3. Build a really big tiled display before they have desktop tools and then charge them to use it…

4. Have the help button on the tool say, “Ya, right!”5. Give them a tool that makes them connect to a license server6. Not pay the license fees for a tool they are using because we want

them to change tools7. 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!)

8. Install really cool stereo monitors, bertha monitors and really expensive computers in common areas for people to see how much $$ the vis group has.

9. Buy everyone in the vis group the new ultra cool 30” apple cinema monitors.

10.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!