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Here are some very quick notes on SC08.

General Impressions:

  • big push for "green computing" ... looking at FLOPS per watt
  • less energy than SC07, perhaps budgets were cut ... not as many booth babes, less give-a-ways, no segways or upside-down bikes
  • huge wave of CUDA on Tesla
  • I was happy to see Michael Dell give the big SC08 keynote, but thought it was too much Dell, not enough SC.

Quick Storage Impressions:

  • LSI has a pretty novel 4U storage array.
    • LSI 60 HDD in 4U
    • redundant design, doubly cabled, no single point of failure
    • disks lay horizonally, very easy to get in and out (but lock in place)
    • 480 TB raw in 4U with 1TB drives
    • sell through systems integrators, not directly
    • LSI performance estimates
      • maximum burst I/O rate from cache: 700k IOPS
      • maximum sustained I/O rate from fiber channel media: 98k IOPS (based on 256-drive config)
      • maximum sustained transfer rate from fiber channel media: 6,400 MB/s
  • Bitmicro gave an interesting talk on solid state disks
    • increasing conventional wisdom that SSDs are more reliable and faster
    • today: 160GB 2.5" SSD max
    • Q: "How fast are we going to move?"
      • A: a lot of fabrication companies are in the red
      • A: ... difficult to predict future capacities
    • Bitmicro predictions for 2010:
      • maximum sustained transfer: 1.3 GB/s
      • 250k random IOPS
  • High-end storage vendors are likely well outside our budget constraints
    • price per TB estimates are significantly higher than white box solutions
    • no comment on the hidden costs of any solution

Quick Programming Notes

  • projects for "bridging the multicore programmability gap:"
    • Chapel, X10, Fortress
    • Rice Habanero project, habanero.rice.edu
    • Haskell
  • tools for using FPGA acceleration
    • FPGA C Compiler, ImpulseC, Catapult...
    • Mit-C (seems pretty popular)
    • MATLAB/Simulink (sound familiar?)
    • RapidMind

Quick Exhibit Floor Impressions:

  • tapesucks.com -- neat rugged portable harddrive solutions
  • OpenMPI seems to be gaining momentum in its collaboration
  • of all of the suppliers I saw, Supermicro had the most exhaustive (a large variety of low- to higher-end compute configurations) and straightforward catalog (detailed specs over marketing)
  • Portland Group looks to have a pretty complete suite of tools around compilers. There seemed to be a buzz around GPU performance in the works... I didn't pick up real details on that one.
  • Mathematica 7 is out... sounds like they are pushing toward the cloud
  • there are free hardware resources available for testing: e.g. http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/teragrid/userinfo/fpga/ @ Purdue and cell-based cluster in Alaska.
  • Mellanox (Yay!) offering adapters supporting 10 GbE and Infiniband on the same card. Choose later.

NRAO at SC09!

-- RonDuPlain - 17 Dec 2008
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