| Cambridge-Cranfield HPCF > Meeting on Clusters |
The CCHPCF hosted a brief meeting on the use of clusters for medium to large scale scientific computation at 2 pm on Monday 6 December in room Meeting Room 3 at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences. The original annoucement and expanded agenda for the meeting follows, together with links to copies of some of the presentations.
This event is intended to be a general technical meeting to describe and discuss the issues surrounding the purchase and use of clusters. In this, it is closer to a Techlink meeting than anything else, but the timing was not convenient to arrange it as one. The meeting will therefore not focus on future plans or describing how the CCHPCF, clusters and the Grid will work together.
Nick Maclaren of the CCHPCF will give an overview of the choices and their
consequences, concentrating on describing the issues that should be
considered when planning the purchase of a cluster or starting a project
to use one for high performance computation. Users who are thinking of
using clusters are invited to explain what they want to do and either
ask questions or make suggestions. The topics will include:
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| Tim Cutts from the Sanger Centre, who run the largest clusters in the
area, will give a description of some of their experiences. Presentation in PDF |
| Gabor Csanyi from Physics will describe his experience with using and
managing clusters. Presentation in PDF |
| We shall probably break for tea at this point. |
| Paul Smith of the CCHPCF will describe how and why he set up maxwell, the
CCHPCF-run Opteron cluster, and what the CCHPCF is currently investigating
for the future. Comments and suggestions would be welcomed. Presentation in PDF |
| Nick Maclaren will continue with more technical aspects. The purpose of
this is to describe what questions need to be answered, what risks there
are, and how to maximise the benefit and minimise the costs, effort and
likelihood of failure. This will contain a lot more questions than answers, and feedback from people who use or manage clusters would be appreciated; there are several areas (such as the performance and usability of the Apple G5 or IBM 970 systems and software). The current list of topics includes:
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