Thomas Zeiser

Some comments by Thomas Zeiser about HPC@RRZE and other things

Content

ICMMES-2006

The 3rd International Conference for Mesoscopic Methods in Engineering and Science (http://www.icmmes.org) is currently taking place in Hampton/VA, USA …

People from Erlangen are very active this year:

  • a tutorial given by Gerhard Wellein on contemporary cache-based CPUs and basic optimization strategies for simple LBM kernels
  • an invited talk by Gerhard Wellein et al. about bleading edge optimizations (e.g. “cache oblivious blocking”)
  • and further contributions from Klaus Iglberger (Simulation of moving particles in 3D), Nils Thürey (“Adaptive simulation of open water free surfaces”), and Thomas Zeiser (Microscale flow analysis of trabecular vertebral bone)
  • and a joint poster of University of Amsterdam, NEC CCRLE, HLRS, CAB and RRZE.

MpCCI 3.0.5 released — but not yet working at RRZE

A new version of MpCCI (3.0.5) has been released. See www.mpcci.org for more details. Many things changed — in particular, the MpCCI library itself should be much more encapsulated so that it should be completely independent of the MPI version used within the application program.

However, owing to licensing problems, the new version could not yet be tested on the HPC systems of RRZE … Well, the solution was rather trivial: the license file did not contain the FQN of the server and therefore checking out or even testing the license from a remote host did not work if the FQN was used there, i.e. the solution was just to replace the shortend hostname by the full hostname (including domain) or also possible by the IP address. After restarting the license server, the licensensing problems disappeard

In the meantime (early August 2006), MpCCI 3.0.5 is also available on the LRZ machines …

However, there seem to be still some problems on the application side — probably not a big surprise as the internal structure of MpCCI 3.0.5 and the API have completely changed …

… especially on SGI Altix systems (or other machines where CPUsets are used), a start mechanism based on ssh cannot be used as CPUsets would be escaped and “batch” processes start running on interactive/boot CPUsets …