RCE - Super Computers

This was a joint podcast between RCE and the Food Fight about Chef a configuration management tool. The show is in two parts, what is HPC and what is Chef.

Be sure to check out the full video of the discussion.

Show page: https://www.rce-cast.com/Podcast/rce-82-chef.html · Licensed CC BY 4.0

Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Steve Tuecke from GlobusOnline. A cloud-based interface for file transfers and data sharing hosted at The University of Chicago.

Steven Tuecke is Deputy Director of the Computation Institute (CI) at The University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, and co-leads the Globus project with Dr. Ian Foster. His focus is on the development of sustainable, cloud-based, software-as-a-service data management solutions to accelerate research. Prior to CI, Steven was co-founder, CEO and CTO of Univa Corporation from 2004-2008, providing open source and proprietary software for the high-performance computing and cloud computing markets. Before that, he spent 14 years at Argonne as research staff. Tuecke graduated summa cum laude with a B.A in mathematics and computer science from St. Olaf College.

Show page: https://www.rce-cast.com/Podcast/rce-81-globus-online.html · Licensed CC BY 4.0

Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Brad Chamberlain and Sung-Eun Choi from Cray about Chapel. Chapel is designed to improve the productivity of high-end computer users while also serving as a portable parallel programming model that can be used on commodity clusters or desktop multicore systems.

Bradford Chamberlain is a Principal Engineer at Cray Inc. where he works on parallel programming models, focusing primarily on the design and implementation of the Chapel language in his role as technical lead for that project. Brad received his Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Washington in 2001 where his work focused on the design and implementation of the ZPL parallel array language. In the past, he has also worked on languages for embedded reconfigurable processors and on algorithms for accelerating the rendering of complex 3D scenes. Brad remains associated with the University of Washington as an affiliate faculty member and is currently teaching a Professional Masters course on Parallel Computation. He received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science with honors from Stanford University in 1992.

Sung-Eun Choi is currently a member of the Chapel group at Cray, Inc. in Seattle, WA. Before joining the Chapel group, she was the lead runtime developer for the Cray XTM (TM) system, a full-custom massively multithreaded computer system. Prior to that, she worked on scalable system software in the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Sung-Eun holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in Seattle.

Show page: https://www.rce-cast.com/Podcast/rce-80-chapel.html · Licensed CC BY 4.0

Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Jeff Darcy of Red Hat about Gluster FS, a distributed scalable open source filesystem.

Jeff has been working on distributed storage since NFS version 2 at Encore in 1990. Most recently he worked on Lustre at SiCortex, and then started his own project HekaFS at Red Hat. Since Red Hat acquired Gluster, he has been an architect and ambassador for that project.

Show page: https://www.rce-cast.com/Podcast/rce-79-gluster-fs.html · Licensed CC BY 4.0

Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Scott Long of Netflix about the new Netflix Cache Appliance. A FreeBSD box with a pile of disk and 2x10gig-e connections. Capable of massive reductions in bandwidth use on ISP networks. We will also cover just what happens when you press play on your Netflix streaming device.

Netflix Tech Blog

Scott began his computing career when he discovered Unix in 1992 while an undergrad at the University of Michigan. In 2000 he became a project committer in the FreeBSD project, and from 2002-2006 he was the project's Release Engineer. After 13 years of writing and maintaining device drivers and core operating system infrastructure at Adaptec, Yahoo!, and other technology companies, Scott joined Netflix in May 2012 to work on their OpenConnect streaming server platform. In 2011 he received a Bachelor's degree in Aviation Science, and shortly afterwards did a brief stint as a commercial airline pilot. Now back in the real world of computer engineering, he enjoys working on device drivers and system scalability, advocating FreeBSD, and building mad-scientist high voltage electronics with his family in Colorado.

Show page: https://www.rce-cast.com/Podcast/rce-78-netflix-cache-appliance.html · Licensed CC BY 4.0

Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with James Browne, Leonardo Fialho and Ashay Rane about PerfExpert, An Easy-to-Use Performance Diagnosis Tool for HPC Applications with Suggestions for Bottleneck Remediation.

James C. Browne

Browne is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Physics at The University of Texas at Austin. Browne earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Physics at The University of Texas in 1960 Browne's current research interests span parallel programming and computation, performance optimization, software engineering, formal methods and fault/failure management for complex systems.

Browne has attained Fellow status in five professional societies and areas: The Association for Computing Machinery, the British Computer Society, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute for Constructive Capitalism. Browne has published approximately 100 papers in computational physics and 250 papers in Computer Science.

Browne received the 2004 University of Texas at Austin Career Research Excellence Award for maintaining a superior research program in such fields as parallel computation, performance measurement and analysis, operating systems, and software engineering for a long time span. Browne has also been active in technology transfer and the technology industry. He founded Hyperformix, an Austin Texas based software company which sells products and services for performance management and engineering for enterprise level computer systems. Hyperformix was acquired by Computer Associates in October, 2010.

Leonardo Fialho

Leonardo Fialho was doing research on fault tolerance for MPI applications at the University Autonoma of Barcelona, Spain, where he obtained an MSc and PhD degrees. Hist first posdoctoral position was at Dublin City University (DCU), Ireland, doing research on power efficiency for telecommunication networks. Currently, Leonardo is an associate researcher at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Ashay Rane

Ashay Rane is a PhD student in the Computer Science department at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining the PhD program in the Fall of 2012, he researched, developed and maintained PerfExpert from December 2010 until August 2012. His experience with performance optimization dates back his Master's degree in Computer Science at Arizona State University, which resulted in a thesis titled, "A Study of the Hybrid MPI/OpenMP Programming Paradigm on Multicore Architectures". His areas of interest include compilers, computer architecture and performance tuning.

Show page: https://www.rce-cast.com/Podcast/rce-77-perfexpert.html · Licensed CC BY 4.0

Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Gene Cooperman and Kapil Arya of Distributed MultiThreaded CheckPointing (DMTCP) a tool for kernel-modification-free, transparent user-space checkpoint and restart.

Gene Cooperman received his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1978 in Applied Mathematics. After some time in both industry and academia, he became an associate professor at Northeastern University in 1986, and a full professor in 1992. He has worked both in symbolic algebra and cluster computing and has over 80 refereed publications. His early work in cluster computing from the 1990s emphasized TOP-C (Task Oriented Parallel Computing).

Show page: https://www.rce-cast.com/Podcast/rce-76-distributed-multithreaded-checkpointing.html · Licensed CC BY 4.0

Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Stuart Martin about Globus, grid software for distributed resource sharing and data transfer.

Stuart Martin is a Software Development Manager with the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. Stuart manages software development for the Globus Toolkit and Globus Online. Stuart has worked on the Globus Toolkit for 15 years and Globus Online for 3 years.

Show page: https://www.rce-cast.com/Podcast/rce-75-globus.html · Licensed CC BY 4.0

Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Steve Lionel of Intel about the modern updates to Fortran.

Steve Lionel is a Staff Consultant for the Developer Products Division of Intel Corporation. He has been working in and around Fortran products since 1978, including several years as project lead for DEC's VAX Fortran compiler, plus stints working on Ada, Pascal and C++ compilers. Steve joined Intel in 2001 and is now part of Intel's Compiler Technical Support team. Steve is a member of the ISO Fortran Standards Committee, posts frequently in the Intel Developer Zone forums (http://software.intel.com) and he blogs and tweets as "DoctorFortran" at http://intel.com/software/drfortran and @DoctorFortran.

Show page: https://www.rce-cast.com/Podcast/rce-74-modern-fortran.html · Licensed CC BY 4.0

Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Steven Johnson and Matteo Frigo about FFTW - Fastest Fourier Transform in the West.

Matteo Frigo is Consulting Member of Technical Staff at Quanta Research Cambridge, Inc. Previously he was Chief Scientist at Axis Semiconductor, and Chief Scientist and Founder at Cilk Arts, Inc. In the past he has worked on parallel programming systems, compilers for exotic machines, signal processing, medical devices, and cache oblivious algorithms.

Steven G. Johnson is Associate Professor in Applied Mathematics at MIT, where he joined the faculty in 2004. He previously received his PhD in physics from MIT, along with bachelor's degrees in physics, mathematics, and computer science at MIT. His work on FFTW began in 1997 with Matteo Frigo when the two were graduate students, and led to their receiving the 1999 Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Software. Most of his research centers around the theoretical understanding, computational modeling, and engineering design of nanoscale physics, especially electromagnetism in media structured at the wavelength scale or below. This has included contributions to the theory of nanostructured dielectric waveguides, the design of solar cells and optical fibers, the understanding of van der Waals forces and thermal radiation, and the design of nonlinear optical devices. He is co-author of the 2008 textbook, Photonic Crystals: Molding the Flow of Light, has published over 150 articles in scientific journals, along with several popular free-software packages for scientific computation and optimization.

Show page: https://www.rce-cast.com/Podcast/rce-73-fftw-fastest-fourier-transform-in-the-west.html · Licensed CC BY 4.0