[NCLUG] parallel processing users?

Matt rosing at peakfive.com
Fri Oct 14 12:54:44 MDT 2005


 > John Gilmore wrote:
 > > Matt wrote:
 > > > Is there anyone lurking out there that does parallel processing in the
 > > > Northern Colorado area?  I'm trying to find like minded people, maybe
 > > > we can help each other.
 > >
 > > What exactly do you mean? Are you looking for people who are running dual 
 > > processors?
 > 

I do contract work for PNNL, a Dept of Energy lab in Washington
state.  They have a ~2000 processor(itanium) machine and it's used for
doing modeling in areas like chemistry and environmental cleanup.
Some people use just a few processors, some use the whole machine all
day, some use 200 processors for a week.  I do a lot of profiling and
looking at hardware counters and rewriting code to make things more
efficient. 

Anyway, performance is what it's all about.  I'm interested in finding
people that use parallel processing because a single processor can't
go fast enough.  Could be distributed jobs, or tightly communicating
models or data mining or computational biology or using specialized
processors or who knows what.  I'm open to anything.  It just seems
that now, since dual core processors are coming out, it might be the
case that making faster chips is harder than parallel chips, so
parallel processing might become more important.

 > Or are you fishing for people who work with "grid" queues of many
 > machines doing distributed job processing?  This would describe my
 > work situation.  I have been managing large compute pools for a number
 > of years.

Sure, if there's a desire to make things go faster. If you have a
hundred blades and everyone's happy with the turnaround time then I
guess it's not that interesting but if there are people that can see a
real benefit to making it go 10 times faster then it's interesting.

 > Or tightly coupled parallel processing such as Beowulf clusters?
 > Always been on my list to play with but never had the time to do so.

That's what I'm more familiar with, but I'd like to learn about new
things. 

Matt






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