Montag, 31. Mai 2010

Intel announces accelerator card

Today at 12:00 at the International Supercomputing Conference ISC2010 here in Hamburg, Intel announced a new accelerator card featuring 32 cores and up to 2 GB RAM which can run 128 threads via hyperthreading. Looks like the accelerator wars have begun. They showed a LU decomposition test running on the card and claimed it to be the fastest decomposition at the moment with more than 500 GFlop/s. Pretty impressive. I was attending the keynote from Kirk B. Skaugen
Vice President, Intel Architecture Group & General Manager, Data Center Group, Intel, USA who demoed the accelerator card and presented a complete software stack including C and FORTRAN compilers.

Donnerstag, 27. Mai 2010

R on the SGI Altix 4700


Here at LRZ we have a large SGI Altix 4700 Supercomputer. Lately we have compiled an MPI-enabled version of R for this beast. The machine sports 9728 cores connected with a ccNUMA link and maxes out at 62 TFlop/s. With R we were able to use a whooping 4000 cores on the machine and still get a decent performance.

MPI programming with R is a breeze. You can use the foreach packages from Revolutions and just transfer your serial code to the supercomputer, replace all %do% with %dopar% and submit your jobs and you are done.

Here is a short tutorial how to start programming on supercomputers with R.