Multicore Computational Center
Multicore Computational Center
As we conclude the fourth quarter of the second year of the MC2, it gives me great pleasure to share with you and other visitors to this web blog the exciting research and accomplishments of our staff.
First , I want to extend congratulations to our two graduate students, Nancy Walia and Navid Golpayegani, who were awarded their Master’s degree in May both having completed highly innovative and challenging research thesis. Nancy’s work on “Parallel External Suffix Array Construction” showed the scalability of the DC3 algorithm executed on the IBM bluegrit system and hence can be used to construct and search for strings in huge (TB) suffix arrays. This met the objectives of her sponsored research by the Laboratory of Telecommunication Sciences. With her mentors, John Dorband, Yaacov Yesha, and Michael Ferguson, a paper for publication is being prepared for journal submission. Navid showed in his thesis titled “Gridding Earth Science Data with Hadoop” that by implementing the Hadoop framework on our bluegrit JS20 series that the MapReduce parallel programming paradigm showed significant speed improvements over our previous approach of separately distributing the gridding of a days collection of satellite radiance to a given blade. His work also showed that the code produced with Hadoop is independent of the gridding resolution, allowing the generation of gridded data sets at arbitrary, user specified, resolutions without incurring heavy compute delays. A paper joint with his mentor, Milt Halem, titled Cloud Computing for Satellite Data Processing on High End Compute Clusters” was submitted to the IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing that can be viewed on our MC2 web site.
As a complement to the Haddop framework, which is now available as a service to any user of bluegrit J series, David Chapman has extended the MapReduce algorithm to work on the SPUs of the Cell processors across multiple blades of the bluegrit Q series. He is now in the process of conducting performance metric analysis to be included in a paper for being prepared for journal review.
I am also excited by the breakthrough work of Srini Kannan , who has implemented the Recursive Hierarchical Segmentation Algorithm on the IBM bluegrit Q series making use of the Cell SPUs. His initial performance tests for a large complex image show that a cell chip outperforms an Intel chip by a factor two for the entire implementation of the highly complex RHSEG code.
I wish to single out several other research efforts culminated this quarter for reporting in this blog. Our student Carl Zellhofer, working tirelessly this entire semester with help from Charles Lohr has resored our Matisse tiled wall display to operational status once more. Moreover, by the acquisition of Nvidia cards installed in the IBM processors Matisse cluster, this system extended so as it interactively accepts data from the bluegrit cell processors and displays in real time the results on Matisse. We expect to have many other interesting computational displays prepared for this interactive wall this coming year.
Shujia Zhou has just submitted his editorial to the special multicore issue of the Journal of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experimentation covering the six reviewed papers presented at the Frontiers of Multicore Computing held in August at UMBC. We are now preparing to conduct our 2nd Frontiers of Multicore Computing Workshop to be held in mid-October. Shujia, working with our systems people Chao Cheng Wu and John Dorband, has also significantly upgraded the IBM bluegrit system cell processing S/W by having installed and tested such systems as the mpich2 library built with gfortran on c1-10, successfully installing PAPI, a standard Performance API for accessing hardware performance counters available on the JS22 and other counters,netcdf 3.6.3, open MP on the cell, and others . He also assisted Po Lun Ma successfully port wrf to IBM QS20's PPU and is in the process of porting certain components to the SPUs. He also gave an invited talk at U/IL conference on multicore computing. John Dorband working with our student Terrin Celeste has successfully brought up the JS22s as well as the QS22s. John has stabilized the entire bluegrit system and configured it as a single integrated hybrid processing system. Working with Charles Lohr, they have installed the VPFS and acquired and built a 20TB disc storage for under $5K that can transfer data at 1Gbs. This is an amazing cost effective storage solution that would have been impossible just a year ago.
I want to recognize our newest GRA, Ashwini Lahanne for her efforts in obtaining the Ozone Mapping Instrument radiative transfer algorithm and implementing it on bluegrit both on the JS 20/21 and the Cell ppu. She is now in the process of conducting component timing as she prepares to convert the code to the SPU for increased performance. She has also converted with Dorbands help such packages like EOS- HDF 2 and EOS- HDF 5 which have not previously run on the power pc processor.
I also would like to acknowledge my colleague Yelena Yesha for all her support in conducting our MC2 retreat and IBM site review in addition to the MC2 proposal she has developed and submitted to the NIST Recovery Act Measurement Science and Engineering Research Grants Program solicitation. Yelena attended and presented at the Invitational Workshop on Smart Interaction a talk at IBM Toronto April 23-24, 2009. Yelena also attended IBM University Day at RTP Raleigh Cloud Computing representing the MC2 while Milt attended a briefing at IBM Watson Labs on the BG/Q. Clearly, this is an impressive step up by IBM over the BG/P by a 20 fold peak performance speed increase. Dr. Halem also attended the IBM cloud computing briefing at the IBM Institute for Electronic Government in DC on 6/3 in DC. We are also working with the sales/technical support people on a configuration to submit to NSF. Yelena also is serving on the Program Committee for the DHS workshop on Cyber Physical Security and is developing a proposal to them that will be using UMBC's multicore system.
We are encouraged and excited on learning from the NSF program manager of I/UCRC that our joint proposal with Ga. Tech and UCSD is being recommended for funding. In the event we are officially notified of the award in the next two weeks or so, we have tentatively reserved the second week in September for the first Industry Advisory Board meeting
This spring, Dr.’s Dorband and Zhou conducted the 2nd Parallel computing with special emphasis on the IBM Cell B.E. with a maximum registration of 20 students. Dr. Halem’s course on Service Oriented Computing with emphasis on Cloud and Grid service computing was approved by the CSEE Graduate Committee to be a permanent offering by the department starting this Fall in the UMBC catalogue. We are in the process of recruiting several new students for the current year and preparing new course material for the parallel computing course to be offered next Spring.
In addition, I want to express my appreciation to all our colleagues, both staff and external collaborators, who participated in the successful MC2 planning retreat held in mid April and the subsequent IBM site visit in mid May. Coming out of both these workshops were critical strategies in formulating the research programs being proposed for the upcoming year. In particular, the planning retreat helped define the scope of an NSF proposal being submitted first for internal pre-proposal approval at UMBC this month for a Major Resource Instrument. We will be teamed with Johns Hopkins University and George Mason University as well as the IBM India Research lab and possibly the HEC group at IBM Watson on a very challenging High End Computer system. The retreat also helped us formulate the research proposals that we submitted during the IBM site review for year 3.
Finally, I would like to direct you to two sites: the latest UMBC magazine at http://www.umbc.edu/magazine/summer09/feature_power.html and the MC2 web site http://mc2.umbc.edu where Pat Carrington has been updating our site with presentations such as my invited talk at the Information Science and Technology Colloquium on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of IT at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Wishing everyone an enjoyable summer and those continuing to work at the MC2 a productive summer as well.
Regards,
Milt Halem
Director, Multicore Computational Center (MC2)