Three Questions To Ask About Clusters Jeffrey K. Hollingsworth hollings@cs.umd.edu Department of Computer Science University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
What goes bump in the night on the cluster? Can I get Performance within X% for two consecutive runs on the same data and cluster? What goes bump in the night on the cluster? OS Processes Power/Heat Scaling on the processor What changes when upgrades happen? Operating System Libraries Hardware Open Question: What value of X is right? 1%, 5%, 10%, 100%?
When Can I Stop Caring About the Network Topology (or Technology)? Range Of Answers: Today -> Never Many Computational Scientists Don’t Care Now Many CS Researchers Still Publish on this topic No Fair making the MPI stack slow to make this possible
How Much Time will I Save with your new Language and at what cost? Programmer Effort Often Today: Trust me it will be easier: Threads, HPF, Transactional Memory Need: Rigorous Study of benefits of features Performance How much performance to give up for easier programming?