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TCSC Newsletters Volume 3 No.2

Announcements about TFCC Activities and Achievements


  • Official 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 an on-line discussion group of over 450 individuals interested in cluster computing. Click to see how to subscribe. Contributions sent to the list are automatically archived. Anyone can browse the past discussion messages at the TFCC-L discussion Archive.


  • TFCC's Annual Reports can be found at http://www.ieeetfcc.org/annual-reports/


  • The IEEE Computer Society's Task Force on Cluster Computing (TFCC) initiated a project that lists the World's TOP Clusters much like the TOP500 Supercomputers' web page. We request you submit data on your cluster to http://www.topclusters.org. Please visit to see the latest rankings.


  • "Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing" research papers
    repository at on-line Computing Research Repository (CoRR)    . More information available at http://www.ieeetfcc.org/ClusterArchive.html. To browse, search, subscribe or submit, please click on CoRR's Website/URL: http://arXiv.org/archive/cs/intro.html. CoRR is available to all members of the community free of charge.


  • Some of the CCGrid 2001 presentation slides of keynote, tutorials, invited, and industry talks are available for download http://www.ccgrid.org/ccgrid2001/ (go to Final program and click on respective titles to download PPT version of slides).


  • Short report on our CCGrid 2001 Symposium in Asian Technology Information Program (ATIP), Tokyo, Japan. See http://www.atip.org/HPC/Public_Reports/atip01.028.pdf


  • The next TFCC sponsored IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2002) will be in Berlin, Germany, May 21-24, 2002
    URL: http://www.ccgrid.org/ccgrid2002/


  • TFCC's mainstream conference is Cluster 2002: the IEEE Fourth International Conference on Cluster Computing. The conference will be held in Chicago, Illinois, USA in September 2002.
    URL: http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/cluster2002/


  • Grid Computing: Proceedings of First IEEE/ACM International Workshop (GRID 2000) is ONLINE. Go to Technical Program and link to online version.
    URL: http://www.gridcomputing.org/grid2000


  • TFCC's White Paper on Cluster Computing available at
    URL: http://www.dcs.port.ac.uk/~mab/tfcc/WhitePaper/


  • Clusters at TOP500 debuts -- The TOP500 Team is publishing a new list about the top 100 High-Performance Clusters. Several TFCC members have collaborated with the TOP500 team to make this come about. The old TFCC web site http://www.TopClusters.org now points to this new web site.
    URL: http://www.top500.org/news/clusters-pr.php3


  • NSF/TFCC Teaching Cluster Computing Workshop Material Online
    Professor Barry Wilkinson (TFCC Education Coordinator) has successfully concluded a 3 day intensive workshop (July 11 - July 13, 2001), funded by the "National Science Foundation" and sponsored by the IEEE Task Force on Cluster Computing. The workshop provided educators with materials and formal instruction to enable them to teach cluster computing at the undergraduate and graduate level. Participants received formal lectures and guided hands-on experience using a dedicated cluster of computers. The workshop lasted three days and took place in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The Full course presentation material is now available online from:
    URL: http://www.cs.uncc.edu/%7eabw/CCworkshop2001/


    You can see Dan Hyde's images of the conference at
    URL: http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~hyde/TeachingCluster/index.html


  • Usenet Newsgroup comp.distributed In November, 2001, TFCC Co-Chair Rajkumar Buyya<rajkumar@csse.monash.edu.au> and David C. DiNucci <dave@elepar.com>submitted a proposal for the creation of a Usenet Newsgroup on Distributed Resource Sharing and Exploitation.


    RATIONALE for comp.distributed


    Networks in general, and the internet specifically, have been evolving, from star topologies of thin clients or dumb terminals connected to central servers, to a collection of highly connected nodes, many having significant compute resources, storage, and peripherals, along with human presence. Likewise, internet tools and protocols have evolved from being primarily a mechanism to "push" (via email) or "pull" (via web-browser) untyped data, into supporting more interactive, semantic, and bi-directional relationships. These changes have prompted different communities to (re-)explore the potential of sharing and exploiting collections of heterogeneous, geographically distributed resources such as computers, data, people, and scientific instruments in a secure and consistent manner, usually lacking any central control or authority. These efforts are often described with terms like "peer-to-peer" ("p2p") and "grids", and can serve to virtualize enterprizes by blurring the significance of physical location.


    The full Request For Discussion (RFD) can be found at http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1003963639.19922%40isc.org&output=gplain


  • Abstracts of Talks from the recent TFCC sponsored Cluster 2001 Conference held in Newport Beach, CA, are on-line at
    URL: http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/cluster2001/program/


Conference Announcements


Call for Papers - Conferences



  • IEEE Fourth International Conference on Cluster Computing (Cluster 2002), will be in Chicago, Illinois, USA in September 2002.
    URL: http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/cluster2002/
    Deadline: For papers April 22, 2002

  • IFIP World Congress 2002 Montreal, Canada, August 25-30, 2002.
    URL: http://www.cips.ca/info2002/en/index.html
    Deadline: For tutorials, workshops October 15, 2001
    Deadline: For papers December 3, 2001

  • 5th International Meeting on High Performance Computing for Computational Science, (VECPAR 2002), Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal, June 26-28, 2002
    URL: http://www.fe.up.pt/vecpar2002/
    Deadline: For papers December 14, 2001


  • Euro-Par 2002 Paderborn, Germany, August 27-30, 2002
    URL: http://europar.upb.de
    Deadline: February 8th, 2002


  • 16th International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS 2002), New York, NY, USA, June 22-26, 2002
    URL: http://www.tc.cornell.edu/ics02/
    Deadline: February 15, 2002


  • International Workshop on Algorithms and Tools for Parallel Computing on Heterogeneous Clusters (HeteroPar'02), Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia, October 20-22, 2002
    URL: http://www.ispras.ru/~mpc/HeteroPar'02.htm
    Deadline: May 1, 2002


  • Cluster Computing Session part of 6th World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics, Orlando, Florida, USA, July 14 - 18, 2002
    URL: http://www.arcos.inf.uc3m.es/~cluster2002
    Deadline: February 10, 2002


  • Special Session on Distributed and Collaborative Data Mining part of Third International Conference on Rough Sets and Current Trends in Computing (RSCTC 2002), Penn State Great Valley, (near Philadelphia) Malvern, PA, October 14-16, 2002
    URL: http://nova.ls.fi.upm.es/hpda/Sessions/session_ddm.html
    Deadline: 15th January 2002


  • 4th International Symposium on High Performance Computing (ISHPC-IV), Kansai Science City, Japan, May 15-17, 2002
    URL: http://alice.ics.nara-wu.ac.jp/ishpc-IV/
    Deadline: Dec. 10, 2001


  • Eighteenth Annual UK Performance Engineering Workshop (UKPEW 2002), University of Glasgow, UK, July 10-11, 2002
    URL: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/ukpew02
    Deadline: 30 April 2002


  • 2002 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA'02), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, June 24-27, 2002
    URL: http://www.ashland.edu/~iajwa/conferences/2002/PDPTA/pdpta.html
    Deadline: February 22, 2002


  • International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing (ISPDC) part of European Conference on Intelligent Systems and Technologies (ECIT), and ROSYCS 2002, Iasi, Romania, 17-20 July, 2002
    URL: http://www.infoiasi.ro/~ispdc/
    Deadline: February 28, 2002


  • 2002 International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP-2002), Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, August 18-21, 2002
    URL: http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/icpp2002
    Deadline: January 31, 2002


  • 16th International Conference on Supercomputing, Columbia University, New York City, NY, USA, June 22-26, 2002
    URL: http://www.tc.cornell.edu/ics02/
    Deadline: February 15, 2002

Call for Papers - Journals


  • IEEE Distributed Systems Online has a section on Cluster Computing.
    TFCC Co Chair Mark Baker invites TFCC members to send newsworthy articles, short papers, links to projects to him at Mark.Baker@computer.org.
    URL: http://computer.org/dsonline


  • Journal of Performance Evaluation and Modelling for Computer Systems (PEMCS)

    welcomes submissions of new papers in all areas related to the field of performance modelling and/or the evaluation of computer systems. Contact Mark Baker Mark.Baker@computer.org
    URL: http://www.dcs.port.ac.uk/~mab/


  • Performance Analysis and Modeling of Parallel and Distributed Applications and Systems forthcoming special issue of Cluster Computing: the Journal of Networks, Software Tools and Applications
    URL: http://www.wkap.nl/prod/j/1386-7857


  • Special Issue on Dependable Distributed Systems in Cluster
    Computing Journal, call for papers

    URL: http://lists.cs.columbia.edu/pipermail/tccc/2001-October/000024.html
    Submission deadline: January 7, 2002


Journal Announcements


  • Parallel And Distributed Computing Practices (PDCP) The Table of Contents and Abstracts of past issues can be found at URL: http://www.cs.okstate.edu/~pdcp


Workshops


  • Agents, Interactions, Mobility, and Systems (AIMS) special track in The 17th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2002), March 10 - 14, 2002, Madrid, Spain
    URL: http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2002


  • Tenth International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Real-Time Systems (WPDRTS 2002) to be held in conjunction with IPDPS2002 April 15-16, 2002, Fort Lauderdale, Florida
    URL: http://comp.uark.edu/~aapon/wpdrts2002/


  • 1st Workshop on Novel Uses of System Area Networks (SAN-1) held in conjunction with 8th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA-8), Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 2, 2002
    URL: http://www.csl.cornell.edu/SAN-1/


  • International Workshop on Performance Modeling, Evaluation, and Optimization of Parallel and Distributed Systems (PMEO-PDS'02) to be held in conjunction with IPDPS 2002, April 15-19, 2002, Fort Lauderdale, Florida
    URL: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/people/personal/geyong/pmeo-pds.html


  • 2002 International Workshop on Invisible Computing (InviCom 2002) part of IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2002) May 21-24, 2002, Berlin, Germany
    URL: http://www.invicom.org


  • GridDemo 2002 Workshop part of IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2002) May 21-24, 2002, Berlin, Germany
    URL: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~rajkumar/griddemo/


  • Agent based Cluster and Grid Computing Workshop part of IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2002) May 21-24, 2002, Berlin, Germany
    URL: http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/User/O.F.Rana/agent-grid-2002/


  • Security Workshop part of IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2002) May 21-24, 2002, Berlin, Germany
    URL: http://www.informatik.uni-heidelberg.de/~Thomas.Ludwig/tmp/security-ws.html


  • Global and Peer-to-Peer Computing on Large Scale Distributed Systems Workshop part of IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2002) May 21-24, 2002, Berlin, Germany
    URL: http://www.lri.fr/~fci/GP2PC.htm


  • Advanced Collaborative Environments Workshop part of IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2002) May 21-24, 2002, Berlin, Germany
    URL: ttp://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/fl/wace/


  • Distributed Shared Memory on Clusters Workshop (DSM 2002) part of IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2002) May 21-24, 2002, Berlin, Germany
    URL: http://www.ens-lyon.fr/~llefevre/dsm2002/index.html


  • Second International Workshop on Internet Computing and E-Commerce (ICEC'02) in conjunction with IPDPS'02, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA, April 15, 2002
    URL: http://www.csis.hku.hk/icec2002/index.html


  • Special Session on Performance of Parallel Architectures and Applications as part of 2002 International Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (SPECTS 2002), San Diego, California, USA, July 14-19, 2002
    URL: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/people/personal/alireza/ss.htm

Tutorials


Book Announcements

  • Infrastructure for Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Scalable Multi-Agent Systems, Springer Verlag, LNAI 1887, ISBN: 3-540-42315-X. URL: http://www.springer.de/cgi-bin/search_book.pl?isbn=3-540-42315-X#english

  • High Performance Mass Storage and Parallel I/O: Technologies and Applications, a joint publication of the IEEE Press and Wiley Press, edited by: Hai Jin, Toni Cortes and Rajkumar Buyya

    Today's data-driven high performance computer technologies demand reliable delivery systems that combine high-level computing, storage, I/O, and network communication performance. Due to the growth of Internet-driven applications like digital libraries, virtual laboratories, video on demand, e-commerce, web services, and collaborative systems, issues such as storage capacity and access speed have become critical in the design of today's computer systems.

    High Performance Mass Storage and Parallel I/O fills the need for a readily accessible single reference source on the subject of high-performance, large scale storage and delivery systems, specifically the use of Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) that are accessed using parallel input/output (I/O) architecture. The authors, all internationally recognized experts in the field, have combined the best of the current literature on the subject with importan information on emerging technologies and future trends.

    Topics covered include:


    * Redundant Disk Array Architectures
    * Fault Tolerance Issues in Disk Arrays
    * Caching and Prefetching
    * Parallel File Systems
    * Parallel I/O Systems
    * Parallel I/O Programming Paradigms
    * Parallel I/O Applications and Environments
    * Emerging Technologies and Future Trends

    A valuable resource for both students and computer technology and professionals in the field, High Performance Mass Storage and Parallel I/O delivers state-of-the-art information that will help today's system designers and application developers meet the increasing demand for high-performance, large-scale storage systems.

    For further information and sample chapters (RAID and InfiniBand) browse the book website: URL: http://www.buyya.com/superstorage


Project Announcements


  • Open Source for Sandia Clustering Software

    The US Sandia National Laboratories has released its Cplant system software that enables clusters of off-the-shelf desktop computers to act co-operatively as a supercomputer.

    This open-source release is intended to allow researchers free access to the body of research and development that created Sandia's scalable, Linux-based, off-the-shelf computer, according to Sandia manager Neil Pundit. Cplant is modelled on the system software that Sandia developed for the ASCI Red supercomputer built by Intel and installed at the Laboratory's Albuquerque site in 1997. It currently ranks as number three in the Top500 list of the world's fastest computers, published on 21 June.

    Sandia's Cplant hardware comprises the largest known sets of Linux clusters for parallel computing. These sets are made up of Compaq Alpha processors and Myrinet interconnects. The largest cluster within Cplant has more than 1,500 Alpha nodes.

    The hope, says Pundit, is that modifications and enhancements made by researchers elsewhere will enrich the system software, and that these improvements will be communicated back to Sandia. Release 1.0 totals approximately 43 MB. Requesters must agree to software licensing terms before downloading.

    The software can be downloaded from the Cplant website at URL: http://www.cs.sandia.gov/cplant

  • Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) And SGI Team Up to Offer First Itanium Processor-Based Cluster. Item thanks to Pedro Diaz Jimenez.

    URL: http://www.osc.edu/press/releases/2001/clusterv41.shtml


Product Announcements


New Web Sites on Cluster Computing


Short Articles


  • The GridSim Toolkit: Resource Modelling and ApplicationScheduling Simulation for Cluster and Grid Computing By TFCC Co-Chair Rajkumar Buyya

    Computational Clusters, Grids, and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have emerged as popular paradigms for next generation parallel and distributed computing. They enable aggregation of distributed resources for solving large-scale data intensive problems in science, engineering, and commerce. In Grid and P2P computing environments, the resources are geographically distributed in multiple administrative domains, managed and owned by different organizations with different policies, and interconnected by wide-area networks or Internet. This introduces several resource management and application scheduling challenges such as security, resource and policy heterogeneity, failures, continuously changing resource conditions, and political issues. The resource management and scheduling system for Grid computing need to manage resources and application execution depending on resource consumers and owners' requirements and continuously adapt to changing in resource conditions.

    The management and scheduling of resources in such large-scale distributed systems is complex and, therefore, demands sophisticated tools for analysing and fine-tuning the algorithms before applying them to the real systems. Simulation appears to be the only feasibe way to analyse algorithms on large-scale distributed systems of heterogeneous resources. Unlike using the real system in real time, simulation works well, without making the analysis mechanism unnecessarily complex, by avoiding the overhead of coordination of real resources. Simulation is also effective in working with very large hypothetical problems that would otherwise require involvement of a large number of active users and resources, which is very hard to coordinate and build at large-scale research environment for investigation purposes.

    To address these issues, we have proposed and developed a Java-based Grid Simulation toolkit called GridSim. The toolkit, built on a basic discrete event simulation system called JavaSim, provides facilities for modeling and simulation of Grid resources (both time and space-shared high performance computers) and network connectivity with different capabilities and configurations. The resources can be modeled to exist in different time zones like in real environments to exhibit different load and cost conditions. GridSim enables the creation of tasks for application models such as task farming and provides interfaces for assigning them to resources. These features can be used to develop resource brokers or Grid schedulers that help in design and evaluation of resource management and scheduling algorithms. We have used the GridSim toolkit to implement a Nimrod-G like Grid resource broker that supports deadline and budget-constrained cost and time minimization scheduling algorithms for executing task farming applications.

    The project members are: Rajkumar Buyya and Manzur Murshed from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

    For further information on the GridSim project and to download the GridSim toolkit, visit: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~rajkumar/gridsim/