[Beowulf] Six card GPU node.

[Christopher Samuel]

On 14/09/16 05:03, Darren Wise wrote:

> By all means I would love to employ a 4U node decked out with XEON Phi
> cards, infact a complete rack full of them but the cheapest I can get my
> hands on a knights landing card is coming close to over £500 GBP and I
> reckon these 6 in total GPU cards will be much faster and also easier to
> work with, it's both nice that the XEON Phi cards have an inbuilt Linux
> OS subsystem but it's a bit of a bummer sometimes and to really eek out
> the extra horsepower that you really need some serious code tailoring to
> get you there..
> 
> I find that in itself the major drawback of folks buying into the XEON
> Phi family for coprocessing or offloading needs..

It's worth keeping in mind that while Knights Corner was effectively a
Linux system on a PCIe board the Knights Landing nodes being done now
are all nodes in their own right, it's a fully hosted system that has
the Knights Landing CPU on the motherboard itself.

> I do hope someone comes along with an idea I had many years ago to use
> SoC technology, I even have a 20x20mm ARM big.LITTLE SoC sat on my desk
> with 64 inbuilt ALU/Crypto/GPU cores and an array of these on a single
> PCI-E card I think would really make a good game changer in the
> coprocessing market.. (anyone want to invest in my PCB{shameless plug})

:-)

> Anyway, my home lab beowulf cluster experience and experiments are doing
> well regardless of the hiccups and total waste of time spent on some
> areas.. It's all going nicely indeed :)

Great to hear!

> *I wonder, if everyone would like to post links of software they use
> with regards to beowulf and clustering so that I may catalogue all these
> links and put them in an html document on my company server, might help
> us all out or in the future :D

OK, some quick samples from what we use:

Slurm (job scheduling): http://slurm.schedmd.com/
xCAT (cluster management): http://xcat.org/
EasyBuild: https://hpcugent.github.io/easybuild/
Open-MPI (our preferred MPI stack): https://www.open-mpi.org/

All the best.
Chris
-- 
 Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
 VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
 Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
 http://www.vlsci.org.au/      http://twitter.com/vlsci