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At least 1,027 records · Page 57

A case for Virtual Machine based Fault Injection in a High-Performance Computing Environment

Large-scale computing platforms provide tremendous capabilities for scientific discovery. These systems have hundreds of thousands of computing cores, hundreds of terabytes of memory, and enormous high-performance interconnection networks. These systems are facing enormous challenges to achieve performance at such scale. Failures are an Achilles heel of these enormous systems. As applications and system software scale up to multi-petaflop and beyond to exascale platforms, the occurrence of failure will be much more common. This has given rise to a push in fault-tolerance and resilience research for HPC systems. This includes work on log analysis to identify types of failures, enhancements to the Message Passing Interface (MPI) to incorporate fault awareness, and a variety of fault tolerance mechanisms that span redundant computation, algorithm based fault tolerance, and advanced checkpoint/restart techniques. While there is much work to be done on the FT/Resilience mechanisms for such large-scale systems, there is also a profound gap in the tools for experimentation. This gap is compounded by the fact that HPC environments have stringent performance requirements and are often highly customized. The tool chain for these systems are often tailored for the platform and while the majority of systems on the Top500 Supercomputer list run Linux, these operating environments typically contain many site/machine specific enhancements. Therefore, it is desirable to maintain a consistent execution environment to minimize end-user (scientist) interruption. The work on system-level virtualization for HPC system offers a unique opportunity to maintain a consistent execution environment via a virtual machine (VM). Recent work on virtualization for HPC has shown that low-overhead, high performance systems can be realized. Virtualization also provides a clean abstraction for building experimental tools for investigation into the effects of failures in HPC and the related research on FT/Resilience mechanisms and policies. In this paper we discuss the motivation for tools to perform fault injection in an HPC context, and outline an approach that can leverage virtualization.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Lustre at Petascale: Experiences in Troubleshooting and Upgrading

Some veterans in the HPC industry semi-facetiously define supercomputers as devices that convert compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems. Effective utilization of large high performance computing resources often requires access to large amounts of fast storage. The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) operates Kraken, a 1.17 PetaFLOPS Cray XT5 for the National Science Foundation (NSF). Kraken s primary file system has migrated from Lustre 1.6 to 1.8 and is currently being moved to servers external to the machine. Additional bandwidth will be made available by mounting the NICS-wide Lustre file system. Newer versions of Lustre, beyond what Cray provides, are under evaluation for stability and performance. Over the past several years of operation, Kraken s Lustre file system has evolved to be extremely stable in an effort to better serve Kraken s users.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

NWChem

Computational atomistic modeling has emerged as a powerful approach for fundamental studies in chemistry, materials science, geosciences, and biology. It has the ability to provide detailed insights into complex phenomena and over the years has grown into a powerful tool not only to validate experiment, but also to predict new phenomena. In order to harness computational modeling to the fullest, superior computational tools are required that not only offer a broad spectrum of capabilities, but are also capable of taking advantage of modern massively parallel computer architectures efficiently to solve real world problems. The NWChem program suite is an example along these lines. It offers a range of capabilities to perform first-principles electronic structure calculations on molecular and periodic systems, classical molecular dynamics simulations and hybrid QM/MM simulations that permits one to combine quantum and classical methods within a calculation. The code is designed to run on high-performance parallel supercomputers as well as conventional workstation clusters with the goal to provide scalable solutions for large scale atomistic simulations. It has been ported to almost all high-performance computing platforms, workstations, PCs running LINUX, as well as clusters of desktop platforms or workgroup servers. The package is scalable, both in its ability to treat large problems efficiently, and in its utilization of available parallel computing resources. The parallel framework for NWChem is provided by the Global Array (GA) toolkit developed at PNNL. NWChem is developed and maintained by the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) located at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington State. The latest release (version 6.0) of the code is distributed under the terms of the Educational Community License (ECL) version 2.0.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Ultlra-intense laser-matter interactions at extreme parameters

The field of shortpulse lasers has seen rapid growth in the recent years with the three major boundaries of energy, pulse duration and repetition rate being pushed in ever extremer regions. At peak powers, already exceeding 10{sup 22} W/cm{sup 2}, in virtually every experiment in relativistic laser physics, the laser pulse interacts with a more or less extended and heated plasma, due to prepulses and ASE-like pedestals on ps - ns time scales. By developing a new technique for ultrahigh contrast, we were able to initiate the next paradigm shift in relativistic laser-matter interactions, allowing us to interact ultrarelativistic pulses volumetrically with overdense targets. This becomes possible by using target and laser parameters that will turn the target relativistically transparent during the few 10s-100s femtoseconds fo the interaction. Specifically, we interact an ultraintese, ultrahigh contrast pulse with solid density, free standing, nanometer diamond target. This paradigm change towards a volumetric overdense interaction in turn enables new particle acceleration mechanisms for both electrons and ions, as well as forward directed relativistic surface harmonics. We report here on first experiments done on those topics at the 200 TW Trident laser at Los Alamos as well as at the Ti:Sapphire system at MBI. We will compare the experimental data to massive large scale 3D simulations done on the prototype of LANL's new Petafiop supercomputer Roadrunner, which is leading the current top 500 list. Specifically, we developed a shortpulse OPA based pulse cleaning technique. Fielding it at the Trident 200 TW laser at Los Alamos, we were able to improve the pulse contrast by 6 orders of magnitude to better than 2 x 10{sup -12} at less than a ps. This enabled for the first time the interaction of a 100J, 200TW laser pulse with a truly solid target with virtually no expansion before the main pulse - target interaction, making possible the use of very thin targets, The thinnest of these at less than 3nm, i.e. 1/300 of the laser wavelength, are even thinner than the plasma skin depth. This drastically changes the laser-matter interaction physics leading to the emergence of new particle acceleration mechanisms, like Break-Out Afterburner (BOA) Acceleration, driven by a relativistic, kinetic plasma instability or Radiation Pressure Acceleration (RPA), driven by stabilized charge separation. Furthermore, these interactions also produce relativistic high harmonics in forward direction as well as mono-en,ergetic electron pulses which might lend itself as a source for fully coherent Thomson scattering in the mulit-keV regime. In this talk I will present an overview over the laser developments leading to this paradigm change as well as over the theoretical and experimental results following from it. Specifically we were able for the first time to demonstrate BOA acceleration of Carbon ions to up to 0.5 GeV using a laser pulse with {approx}10{sup 20} W/cm{sup 2} intensity and showing the scalability of this mechanism into regimes relevant for Hadron Therapy. We were further able to demonstrate mono-energetic electron break-out from ultrathin targets, as a first step towards a flying mirror.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Optimizing the inner loop of the gravitational force interaction on modern processors

We have achieved superior performance on multiple generations of the fastest supercomputers in the world with our hashed oct-tree N-body code (HOT), spanning almost two decades and garnering multiple Gordon Bell Prizes for significant achievement in parallel processing. Execution time for our N-body code is largely influenced by the force calculation in the inner loop. Improvements to the inner loop using SSE3 instructions has enabled the calculation of over 200 million gravitational interactions per second per processor on a 2.6 GHz Opteron, for a computational rate of over 7 Gflops in single precision (700/0 of peak). We obtain optimal performance some processors (including the Cell) by decomposing the reciprocal square root function required for a gravitational interaction into a table lookup, Chebychev polynomial interpolation, and Newton-Raphson iteration, using the algorithm of Karp. By unrolling the loop by a factor of six, and using SPU intrinsics to compute on vectors, we obtain performance of over 16 Gflops on a single Cell SPE. Aggregated over the 8 SPEs on a Cell processor, the overall performance is roughly 130 Gflops. In comparison, the ordinary C version of our inner loop only obtains 1.6 Gflops per SPE with the spuxlc compiler.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Review of multi-dimensional large-scale kinetic simulation and physics validation of ion acceleration in relativistic laser-matter interaction

Two new experimental technologies enabled realization of Break-out afterburner (BOA) - High quality Trident laser and free-standing C nm-targets. VPIC is an powerful tool for fundamental research of relativistic laser-matter interaction. Predictions from VPIC are validated - Novel BOA and Solitary ion acceleration mechanisms. VPIC is a fully explicit Particle In Cell (PIC) code: models plasma as billions of macro-particles moving on a computational mesh. VPIC particle advance (which typically dominates computation) has been optimized extensively for many different supercomputers. Laser-driven ions lead to realization promising applications - Ion-based fast ignition; active interrogation, hadron therapy.

ACCELERATION↗

Visualization and data analysis

Talk about Visualization and Data Analysis Current State and Exascale challenges. The goal is to update with colleagues our current status in our research. What challenges we need to face, and what future possibilities. Our goal is to propose to approach the problems with the visualization approach operating on the supercomputing platform. This presentation is about the L2 Milestone, we intend to discuss further possibilities of enhancing our results and optimizing our solutions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Visualization and data analysis outbrief

Talk about Visualization and Data Analysis Current State and Exascale challenges. The goal is to update with colleagues our current status in our research. What challenges we need to face, and what future possibilities. Our goal is to propose to approach the problems with the visualization approach operating on the supercomputing platform. This presentation is about the L2 Milestone, we intend to discuss further possibilities of enhancing our results and optimizing our solutions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Visualization and data analysis-current state and exascale challenges

Talk about Visualization and Data Analysis Current State and Exascale challenges. The goal is to update with colleagues our current status in our research. What challenges we need to face, and what future possibilities. Our goal is to propose to approach the problems with the visualization approach operating on the supercomputing platform. This presentation is about the L2 Milestone, we intend to discuss further possibilities of enhancing our results and optimizing our solutions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Invisible Milky Way Satellite Uncovered With Help from NERSC

Astronomers predict that large spiral galaxies, like our Milky Way, have hundreds of satellite galaxies orbiting around them. While a few satellites are visible, like the Magellanic Clouds, many other galaxies are too dim to see. Scientists suspect that these faint satellite galaxies are primarily comprised of mysterious "dark matter"; which makes up 85 percent of all matter in the universe and so far remains undetected. Using supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), Sukanya Chakrabarti, an assistant professor of physics at Florida Atlantic University, developed a mathematical method to uncover these "dark"; satellites. When she applied this method to our own Milky Way galaxy, Chakrabarti discovered a faint satellite might be lurking on the opposite side of the galaxy from Earth, approximately 300,000 light-years from the galactic center. According to Chakrabarti, the dark satellite galaxies create disturbances in the cold atomic hydrogen gas at the edges of the spiral galaxy's disk, and these perturbations reveal the mass, distance and location of the satellite. With the help of NERSC systems, she successfully validated her method by analyzing the radio observations of the Whirlpool Galaxy, which has a visible satellite one-third of its size, and NGC 1512, which has a satellite one-hundredth its size. Her calculations correctly predicted the mass and location of both of the known satellite galaxies. http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news031411.html

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

A Framework for Federated Two-Factor Authentication Enabling Cost-Effective Secure Access to Distributed Cyberinfrastructure

As cyber attacks become increasingly sophisticated, the security measures used to mitigate the risks must also increase in sophistication. One time password (OTP) systems provide strong authentication because security credentials are not reusable, thus thwarting credential replay attacks. The credential changes regularly, making brute-force attacks significantly more difficult. In high performance computing, end users may require access to resources housed at several different service provider locations. The ability to share a strong token between multiple computing resources reduces cost and complexity. The National Science Foundation (NSF) Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) provides access to digital resources, including supercomputers, data resources, and software tools. XSEDE will offer centralized strong authentication for services amongst service providers that leverage their own user databases and security profiles. This work implements a scalable framework built on standards to provide federated secure access to distributed cyberinfrastructure.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Science and Technology at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

ORNL Director Thom Mason explains the groundbreaking work in neutron sciences, supercomputing, clean energy, advanced materials, nuclear research, and global security taking place at the Department of Energy's Office of Science laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Pete Beckman on Mira and Exascale

Argonne's Pete Beckman, director of the Exascale Technology Computing Institute (ETCi), talks about the IBM Bluegene Q supercomputer and the future of computing and Exascale technology.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Red Sky with Red Mesa

The Red Sky/Red Mesa supercomputing platform dramatically reduces the time required to simulate complex fuel models, from 4-6 months to just 4 weeks, allowing researchers to accelerate the pace at which they can address these complex problems. Its speed also reduces the need for laboratory and field testing, allowing for energy reduction far beyond data center walls.

180-TERAFLOP↗

Climate Modeling

Salil Mahajan applies ORNL's supercomputing capabilities to modeling the Earth's climate.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

LANL Studies Earth's Magnetosphere

A new 3-D supercomputer model presents a new theory of how magnetic reconnection works in high-temperature plasmas. This Los Alamos National Laboratory research supports an upcoming NASA mission to study Earth's magnetosphere in greater detail than ever.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Small Improvements Make a Big Difference

Modeling and simulation completed on ORNL supercomputers (Jaguar and Titan) improved highway fuel efficiency, taking a concept from design to market in 18 months.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Argonne News Brief: Cancer’s Big Data Problem

Data is pouring into the hands of cancer researchers, thanks to improvements in imaging, models and understanding of genetics. But they’ll need a lot of help—and some powerful supercomputers—to translate this data into better, more personalized treatment for cancer patients. A new initiative called the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer, which taps four different national laboratories, is poised to help.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗