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TCSC Newsletters Volume 2 No.1

Announcements about TFCC Activities and Achievements


  • TFCC Education Promotion Program - Book Donations With the generous contributions from "MPI Software Technology, Inc.", (thanks to Anthony Skjellum), TFCC would like to announce the donation of 50 copies of the following books to interested TFCC members.

    • Using Mpi: Portable Parallel Programming With the MPI,,
      Vol.1, 2nd edition, by W. Gropp, E. Lusk, A. Skjellum, MIT Press.
    • Proceedings of MPIDC'99 -- MPI and High-Performance Clusters Developer's and User's Conference.

    Interested TFCC members should contact TFCC Co-chair Rajkumar Buyya.


  • Offical TFCC Membership
    We strongly urge everyone interested in Cluster Computing to register as a Task Force on Cluster Computing (TFCC) member with the IEEE Computer Society. Membership is free and you do not have to be an IEEE Computer Society member. There are two easy ways to sign up:


    When you are an official member, we can serve you better. And the IEEE Computer Society knows that the Task Force is strong and healthy. Therefore, we strongly encourage you to "vote with your feet" and register!


  • TFCC has new registered Internet Domain Name
    http://www.ieeetfcc.org/

  • TFCC has released its Whitepaper on Cluster Computing
    http://www.dcs.port.ac.uk/~mab/tfcc/WhitePaper/


  • 1st IEEE Computer Society International Workshop on Cluster Computing (IWCC '99) proceedings are now available online

    All Computer Society members with an e-account can access the full proceedings from:
    http://computer.org/proceedings/iwcc/0343/0343toc.htm To access abstracts, you do not need account. If you do not have an account, see http://computer.org/webaccounts/.


    In case you want to access slides of plenary talk and other key speeches, please access: http://www.dgs.monash.edu.au/~rajkumar/tfcc/IWCC99/


  • Ishfaq Ahmad's article on Cluster Computing in the January-March 2000 issue of IEEE Concurrency Journal, pages 67-69 has great coverage of our TFCC first annual event (IWCC '99) held in Melbourne. Read the article at

    http://www.dgs.monash.edu.au/~rajkumar/tfcc/ieee_concurrency_tfcc.pdf


  • Co-chair Rajkumar Buyya presented TFCC activities at the Panel on "Activities for Global and Cluster Computing" as part of International Workshop on Global and Cluster Computing (WGCC 2000) March 15 - 17, 2000, Tsukuba, JAPAN. His slides are at http://www.ieeetfcc.org/tfcc-panel-wgcc-Japan2000/


  • TFCC initiates Project top500clusters.org as a joint work with Jack Dongarra and others of TOP500.org. The goal is to identify the top 500 clusters in the world. See the latest at http://www.top500clusters.org/


  • TFCC Report on: "Cluster Computing R&D in Australia" written for Asian Technology Information Program (ATIP) for sponsoring IWCC'99 event. The authors (all TFCC members) of the report are: Mark Baker, Rajkumar Buyya, Ken Hawick, Heath James and Hai Jin. The report covers research and development on cluster computing in Australia and the Asia Pacific region. The summary of this report can be found at: http://www.atip.org/public/atip.reports.00/atip00.015.pdf


  • TFCC was represented by Co-chair Rajkumar Buyya in a Panel: Activities for Global and Cluster Computing. Moderated by Satoshi Matsuoka and organised at International Workshop on Global and Cluster Computing (WGCC'2000) March 15 - 17, 2000, Tsukuba, Japan.


  • Shahriar Shahhoseini, TFCC Middle East Coordinator, presented a talk on March 9, 2000 entitled: "Cluster Computing: The Future Trend in Parallel Processing" at the 5th Annual International CSI Computer Conference (CSIC 2000) at Tehran, Iran. The presentation slides are at http://members.tripod.com/~h_s_shahhoseini/talks/csicc2000_talk.htm



Conference Announcements



Call for Papers - Conferences



  • IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (CLUSTER 2000) Technische Universität Chemnitz, Saxony, Germany, November 28 - December 2, 2000 Submission deadline: 7 June 2000
    URL: http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/informatik/RA/cluster2000/index.htm

  • 6th International Workshop on High-Level Parallel Programming Models and Supportive Environments (HIPS 2001) (in conjunction with IPDPS 2001) April 23, 2001, San Francisco, California, USA. Submission deadline: 30 October 2000 URL: http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~mueller/hips01/


  • Optical Networking and Communications Conference,OptiComm 2000 October 22-26, 2000 Richardson, Texas, USA Submission Deadline: 30 May 2000 URL: http://www.opticomm.or



Workshops




Book Announcements



  • New Book Building Linux Clusters by David HM Spector, O'Reilly and Associates, 2000. Available May, 2000. Chapter 9 "Application Examples" is on line as a sample chapter. URL: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/clusterlinux/


  • Book Review of High Performance Cluster Computing: Architectures and Systems Vol. 1 and Programming and and Applications Vol. 2 edited by Rajkumar Buyya, Prentice Hall, 1999. In "Book Reviews" section of January-March 2000 issue of IEEE Concurrency Journal, pages 86-87. Review is by Lalit M. Patnaik. To read select http://www.dgs.monash.edu.au/~rajkumar/cluster/ieee_concurrency_review.pdf


Project Announcements


  • Latest on InfiniBand I/O Architecture Greg Pfister reports that InfiniBand (old SIO, the joining of NGIO and FIO) has published some presentations available to the public. Go to http://www.infinibandta.org/, watch the pretty animation, then click on "Events". The presentations made 17-20 January 2000 at the Server I/O conference are there in Acrobat format.

    They also have posted the presentations from the prior "event" -- on that page, click on the obvious thing in the upper right, under "Past Events."


  • The Compute Power Grid (CPG) Project by Rajkumar Buyya and Mark Baker. The concept of economic-based resource management and scheduling can be found in the paper:
    http://www.dgs.monash.edu.au/~rajkumar/papers/nimrodg.pdf A few ideas from the above paper will be useful for this project. We need to explore many more ideas, the way we develop the system, paradigm/model that we support. It goes beyond the SETI project, adds economic concept and builds generic interfaces that users can use. We will explore what tools and applications we can develop as we progress.


    Now we would like to invite interested TFCC members to join this project and let us know which part of project you are interested in. Those having comments and suggestions on the project, please let us know. URL: http://www.ComputePower.com/


  • cJVM: A Cluster-Aware JVM project at IBM URL: http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/projects/systech/cjvm.html


  • EcoGRID: Economy driven Computational GRID Resource Management System The focus of their research is on the developement of economic or market-based resource management and scheduling system for global grid computing. URL: http://www.dgs.monash.edu.au/~rajkumar/eGRID/


New Web Sites on Cluster Computing




Short Article



  • Windows Compute Clusters: Why, When and How?

    Dr Kenji Takeda, School of Engineering Sciences, University of Southampton, UK

    Editor, Windows Clusters Resource Centre @ www.windowsclusters.org

    Why?

    The remarkable advances in Personal Computer (PC) technology are creating a major upheaval in high performance computing that is hard to ignore. The Beowulf project has helped spearhead the cluster revolution, with the adoption of an open-source operating system (typically Linux) as a key to its success, and continues to drive the cluster community forward at a tremendous pace.

    While Linux-based systems are suitable for many environments, the allure of tapping into the huge installed base of Microsoft Windows PCs is tremendous. The success of the Berkeley SETI @home(Search for Extraterretrial Intelligence) project, which packages its radar signal analysis software as a Windows 95/98/NT screensaver, has been tremendous and demonstrates the capability of distributed computing on a global scale. If this type of metacomputing can be even partially realised within a given organisation, be it a major corporation or small business, the pooled computing resource would be impressive. On a more modest scale, even a handful of office PCs can provide enough parallel computing power to significantly improve throughput and make a difference to companies who might not otherwise be able to afford a dedicated compute server.

    Decisions regarding operating systems go well beyond the scope of this article and must take into account management and strategic issues. For PC clusters, the OS choice is primarily Linux versus Windows NT/2000. Of course, there are vociferous proponents for both camps, making the choice difficult in the light of much subjective information. The important thing to bear in mind is that there is a choice, and circumstances will often determine the outcome before the technical issues become of paramount importance. And note, for parallel computing it is not the operating system that is most important for performance, but the compiler and communications infrastructure (eg: MPI over fast Ethernet) that will typically determine application efficiency.

    When?

    The development of Microsoft Windows-based clusters has lagged behind the Beowulf project and its descendants, but is becoming more prevalent. The NCSA NT Supercluster, part of the Illinois Fast Messages/High Performance Virtual Machines project, and the Cornell Theory Centre's AC3 cluster are two prime examples of how Windows Clusters can provide the highest level of scalability for traditional supercomputer applications. Both of these machines have 256+ nodes, use dedicated high performance networking and run large scientific and engineering applications ported from UNIX-based systems to Windows NT. At the other end of the scale is the use of existing office PCs for compute-intensive tasks. For example, codes such as PAFEC-FE Vibroacoustic and Fluent on NT can run efficiently across ethernet networks and open up possibilites for small and medium sized businesses to exploit their IT assets to the full.

    How?

    The last 2-3 years has seen the emergence of much more hardware and software for cluster computing under Microsoft Windows. There are now commercially supported versions of MPI for Windows NT from MPI Pro Technology Inc and Genias, as well as several other freely available implementations including an official port of MPICH from Argonne National Laboratory. Established cluster management software such as LSF and Condor is now available for Windows, and with Terminal Services now built into Windows 2000 Advanced Server, it is easier to remotely access and centrally manage a cluster. The pieces are in place to be able to make cost-effective use of Windows PCs for compute-intensive parallel applications from the desktop to supercluster level.

    To help provide a single source of information and discussion forum for Window Clusters users, the University of Southampton has launched the Windows Clusters Resource Centre, with support from Microsoft Research. It is hoped that this Resource Centre will be useful to the community as a whole and will grow as contributions from other groups are added.