- This event has passed.
LANS Informal Seminar: Pete Beackman
February 7, 2007 @ 15:00 CST
Seminar Title: ZeptoOS, BG/P, and Petascale Machines
Speaker: Pete Beackman, MCS
Date/Time: 2007-02-07 15:00
Location: MCS Room A-21
Description:
In the beginning, supercomputers ran a simple operating system. In some cases, customers wrote their own OS for the raw hardware. As MPPs and clusters emerged, they began to run thousands of instances of an operating system. Today, supercomputers have several types of operating systems on different functional units: storage nodes, compute nodes, login nodes, service nodes, etc. Most of the time they are based on Linux. As machines scale up, however, simple design choices what worked well for servers or several thousand nodes suddenly become bottlenecks. Can Linux be used for
petascale BlueGene/P systems? Are preemptive multitasking operating systems doomed to fail on petascale machines? We investigate noise by measuring existing operating systems and injecting artificially generated noise into a massively parallel system to measure its influence on the performance of collective operations. What are the fundamental constraints, and what does the real data suggest? This talk will address these questions and present data gathered from experiments on the Watson BG/L system. The ZeptoOS Linux kernel and build system for BG/L I/O nodes will also be presented, as well as our plans for running Linux on
BlueGene/P compute nodes.