Title: Department of Computer Science Seminar
Date:  Monday, 5 May 2003
Time:  3:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Venue: Room N101, CSIT Building [108]


Title:   Enabling the Efficient Use of SMP Clusters:
         The GAMESS/DDI Model


Speaker: Ryan Olson (Dept of Chemistry, Iowa State University)


Abstract:
  GAMESS is a widely used computational chemistry package. Depending
  on the problem at hand it is not uncommon for GAMESS calculations
  to run for days, weeks or even months on state of the art single
  processor workstations. To reduce the time to solution to more
  acceptably levels and/or to enable even larger problems to be tackled,
  over the years much effort has been directed at enabling GAMESS to
  run on various high performance parallel computing platforms. This
  effort has seen the code move from the use of early message passing
  models, to MPI, to the Distributed Data Interface (DDI).

  In recent years, as technology has trickled down from supercomputers
  into the personal computer market, clusters of PC's (Beowulf clusters)
  have become a popular and relatively inexpensive means of accessing
  serious computational power and very large aggregate memory. Originally
  these clusters comprised single processor boxes coupled via ethernet,
  but are now increasingly assembled from small shared memory parallel
  (SMP) nodes containing 2, 4, 8 or more CPUs linked via a choice of
  various advanced network technologies (possibly with "intelligent"
  interface cards). The aim of this seminar will be to outline our
  efforts to exploit these new environments.

  The talk will give an outline of the DDI and the DDI programming 
  model. We will discuss the initial implementation of DDI that was 
  on the Cray T3D system using Cray's SHMEM library, then outline how
  the model was extended to support Beowulf Cluster type systems.
  We will then consider our recent work to extend the DDI model for
  clusters of SMP systems and large NUMA based SMPs. Performance data
  will be presented for a variety of systems, including both the HP
  SC and GS systems available at the ANU in the APAC National Facility.


Biography:
  Ryan Olson, Dept of Chemistry, Iowa State University and 
  The Scalable Computing Laboratory, Ames, IA 50011


URL: http://cs.anu.edu.au/lib/seminars/seminars03/dept20030505