Designing High-End Computing Systems and Programming Models with InfiniBand and High-Speed Ethernet

A Tutorial to be presented at The 25th International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS 2011)
by
Dhabaleswar K. (DK) Panda and Sayantan Sur (The Ohio State University)

When: May 31, 2011 afternoon
Where: Tucson, Arizona, USA

InfiniBand (IB) and High-Speed Ethernet (HSE) technologies are generating a lot of excitement towards building next generation High-End Computing (HEC) systems and enterprise datacenters. This tutorial will provide an overview of these emerging interconnect architectures, their offered features, their current market standing, and their suitability for prime-time HEC and data centers. It will start with a brief overview of IB, HSE, and their architectural features. An overview of the emerging OpenFabrics stack which encapsulates both IB and HSE in a unified manner will be presented. IB and HSE hardware/software solutions and the market trends will be highlighted. Finally, sample performance numbers highlighting the performance these technologies can achieve in different environments such as MPI, UPC, Global Arrays, Sockets, Parallel File Systems, Multi-tier Datacenters, and Virtual Machines, will be shown.

Targeted Audience and Scope

This tutorial is targeted for various categories of people working in the areas of high performance communication and I/O, storage, networking, middleware, programming models and applications related to high-end systems. Specific audience whom this tutorial is aimed at include:

The tutorial content is planned for half-a-day. The content level is broken down as 20% beginner, 50% intermediate, and 30% advanced. There is no fixed pre-requisite. As long as the attendee has a general knowledge in high performance computing, cluster computing, networking, and storage, he/she will be able to understand and appreciate it. The tutorial is designed in such a way that an attendee gets exposed to the topics in a smooth and progressive manner.

Outline of the Tutorial

Brief Biography of Speakers

Dr. Dhabaleswar K. (DK) Panda is a Professor of Computer Science at the Ohio State University. He obtained his Ph.D. in computer engineering from the University of Southern California. His research interests include parallel computer architecture, high performance computing, communication protocols, files systems, network-based computing, and Quality of Service. He has published over 285 papers in major journals and international conferences related to these research areas. Dr. Panda and his research group members have been doing extensive research on modern networking technologies including InfiniBand and 10GigE/iWARP. His research group is currently collaborating with National Laboratories and leading InfiniBand and 10GigE/iWARP companies on designing various subsystems of next generation high-end systems. The MVAPICH/MVAPICH2 (High Performance MPI over InfiniBand and iWARP) open-source software packages, developed by his research group, are currently being used by more than 1,550 organizations worldwide (in 60 countries). This software has enabled several InfiniBand clusters (including the 6th and 7th ranked ones) to get into the latest TOP500 ranking. These software packages are also available with the Open Fabrics stack for network vendors (InfiniBand and iWARP), server vendors and Linux distributors (RedHat and SUSE). Dr. Panda's research is supported by funding from US National Science Foundation, US Department of Energy, and several industry including Intel, Cisco, SUN, Mellanox, QLogic and NetApp. He is an IEEE Fellow and a member of ACM. More details about Dr. Panda, including a comprehensive CV and publications are available here.

Dr. Sayantan Sur Dr. Sayantan Sur is a Research Scientist at the Department of Computer Science at The Ohio State University. His research interests include high speed interconnection networks, high performance computing, fault tolerance and parallel computer architecture. He has published more than 20 papers in major conferences and journals related to these research areas. He is a member of the Network-Based Computing Laboratory lead by Dr. D. K. Panda. He is currently collaborating with National Laboratories, Supercomputer Centers, and leading InfiniBand companies on designing various subsystems of next generation high performance computing platforms. He has contributed significantly to the MVAPICH/MVAPICH2 (High Performance MPI over InfiniBand and 10GigE/iWARP) open-source software packages. The software developed as a part of this effort is currently used by over 1,550 organizations in 60 countries. In the past, he has held the position of Post-doctoral researcher at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne and Member Technical Staff at Sun Microsystems. Dr. Sur received his Ph.D. degree from The Ohio State University in 2007. More details about Dr. Sur are available here .
Last Updated: May 7, 2011