Speaker
Description
Conclusions and Future Work
The experience made in PI2S2 has shown the relevance for researchers to adopt new and better technologies but only if they allow an easy and efficient integration with the existing applications. In fact, PI2S2 users were interested in the possibility to run their single job faster than ever rather than massive job production. Future work of PI2S2 is to increment the number of supported applications developing new plug-ins and tools for other HPC models.
URL for further information
https://grid.ct.infn.it/twiki/bin/view/PI2S2/WikiConsorzioCometa
Keywords
MPI, HPC, WMS, wrapper
Detailed analysis
The Sicilian Grid infrastructure has been modified to support both academic and commercial HPC applications. The low-latency net InfinBand connection is available on each site. The scheduling policy has been tailored to the needs of the massively parallel applications, using either pre-emption or reservation of resources. The middleware has been modified by adding new wrappers, compilers, pre- and post-processing scripts. The extended support covers both MPI and MPI2 flavours on a GigaBit Ethernet or InfiniBand net. Moreover the dependence to net communication has been reduced by concentrating the execution on the lowest possible number of physical processors (granularity). Fluent, OpenFOAM, GAMESS and ClustalW are the leader applications used to validate the infrastructure as a HPC facility. The present talk describes the porting procedures and scalability diagrams, also comparing with the performance of the applications on other clusters, when available.
Impact
Sicilian Scientific and businness communities were reluctant to move their computation activities on a Grid environment as this environment had never been used before to run relevant HPC applications. The customisation/adaptation work made with PI2S2 has provided the scientific communities with the environment their required to run efficiently their applications maintaining the typical Grid flexibility. As a result, all the institution involved are using the whole power provided by PI2S2 for their research and are planning to employ the infrastructure for areas not considered in the first implementation. Thus currently the list of supported applications, both commercial and free, is continuously expanding. Additionally, other regional Grids at national and international levels are analysing the proposed approach for HPC applications since their communities have similar problems to deploy such applications in their infrastructure.
