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.

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Questions?

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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)

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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…).

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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

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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)

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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?

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For tomorrow’s discussion…

Top Ten Ways to Really Tick-Off Vis Users1. 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 solutions3. 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!