IGT HPC Work Group Meeting

- Intel® Parallel Software Tools for HPC and Multi-Core Computing - Erlang for 5 nines

Monday, December 8th, 2008 IGT Offices, Maskit 4, 5th Floor, Hertzliya. 14:00-14:15: OPENING - Avner & Guy 14:15-15:00: Intel® Parallel Software Tools for HPC and Multi-Core Computing Herbert Cornelius, Director Advanced Computing Center EMEA and Alexander Supalov, Engineering Manager Intel Cluster Tools Abstract As we see Moore's Law still continuing, more and more parallelism is introduced to all computing platforms and on all levels of integration and programming. Especially in the area of High-Performance Computing (HPC) users can entertain a combination of different hardware and software parallel architectures and programming environments. Those technologies range from vectorization and SIMD computation over shared memory multi-threading (e.g. OpenMP) to distributed memory message passing (e.g. MPI) on cluster systems. But it also puts more and more demand on software (development) tools for parallel computing in respect to the various challenges and opportunities. This talk will briefly outline major hardware architectural trends in HPC (including multi-core) and its associated parallel software tools. We will cover the respective Intel® Software Tools for the main phases of parallel software development: implementation, correctness, analysis and performance. A special emphasis will be put on the MPI message passing library as a vital component for scalable high-performance applications on modern cluster systems. 15:00-15:15 Break 15:15-16:00: Erlang for 5 nines Zvi Avraham, CTO, Nivertech Ltd. Abstract Zvi will present on the concurrent soft real time functional programming language Erlang and its OTP (Open Telecom Platform) framework. He will explain why Erlang programs are generally 4 - 10 times shorter than their counterparts in Java, C and C++ achieving 99,999% availability. The talk also explains why Erlang, originally invented to handle the next generation of Telecom products, has been successful in a much wider range of sectors including Internet, banking and e-commerce. 16:00-16:15: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUDING REMARKS To register, please send your contact details to info@grid.org.il We are looking forward to seeing you! Best Regards, Guy Tel-Zur, Ph.D. IGT Chairman www.Grid.org.il

VPN over Cellular

I like my Nokia 6210 Navigator, I use it to connect securely via VPN to the Ben-Gurion University domain when I am out of office. Below are two pictures that show how it works.

I connect the phone via a USB cable (Bluetooth is also possible), then I use the Nokia PC-Suite to connect to the Internet while the mobile phone acts as a MODEM.

I then use the VPN (RSA SecurID) to connect to the campus.

Two comments:

1) To make the test fully reliable the WiFi was completely switched-off using the airplane mode button located at the front of my T61 ThinkPad notebook.

2) I wrote this post using the new Microsoft Live Writer Beta – a multi-blog- editor which I find useful.

The 2008 Comsol Conference in Tel Aviv

Comsol is an interesting tool for Multi-Physics simulations.
Today took place the annual conference of Comsol in Israel, the agenda is described below:

Here are two photos I took using my cellphone:


The conference building:


I have serious doubts how one can do serious Multi-Physics simulations without serious Parallel Processing capabilities. The current version, 3.5, of Comsol has no Distributed Parallel Processing support, e.g. MPI and a limited Multi-Core support but not at the user level; No Parallel Computing commands and no external Parallel Tools like Star-P. This limits the problem size that can be simulated.
However, for sure it is an excellent tool for education.