NOTUR 2004 HPC Competancy Project at NTNU --
GRID, Cluster and Storage Technologies

This project is a joint effort by NTNU, U of Bergen, U of Oslo, U of Tromsø and UNINETT. Statoil will also be participating.

Elster helped raise NOK 1 million at NTNU for these projects, which made NTNU the largest partner. These funds are now mached by the Research Council of Norway (RCN) which also added in NOK 450K for expanded storage HW.

Old snapshot of IDI's
research cluster ClustIs
Part of NTNUs gang on March 25, 2004

Rear from left: Arne Sødal, Jørn Amundsen, Tor Arvid Lund, Morten Rodal, Per Holager
Middle from left: Lars Eilertsen, Martin Eian, Frode Nilsen, Peter Hughes, Arve Dispen
Front from left: Anne Elster, Robin Holtet, Gunnar Brataas, Kjetil Nørvåg, Trond Kandal
Taking photo: Marius Grannas

Time-line: January - December 2004

NTNU Budget: NOK 2 million (NOK 1 million from NTNU matched by RCN)

NTNU Over-all Project organizers: Jørn Amundsen and Anne C, Elster

Participants: Researchers, students and staff at NTNU from IDI and ITEA See list of people that is involved.

Background

NOTUR (The Norwegian High Performance Computing Consortium) has a subprogram entitled Emerging Technologies (ET) that was split into two smaller programs:

Cluster Technologies centered at NTNU and The University of Tromsø (UiT), and

Grid Technologies centered at The University of Oslo (UiO) and The University of Bergen (UiB).

This program is continued in 2004 as competancy projects in the following 3 areas:

Cluster Technologies lead by Tor Johansen, The University of Tromsø (UiT),

Grid Technologies lead by Andreas Botnen at The University of Oslo (UiO), and

Storage Technologies led by staff at NTNU.

The above project leaders report to Jacko Koster at Univ. of Bergen who again reports to the project leader of NOTUR, Bjørn Hafskjold.

NTNU is involved in all 3 subprojects.

Project Goal

The goals of these competancy projects are to analyze HPC technologies' suitability for HPC in the context of NOTUR. The results will provide a foundation for decisions regarding future HPC programs.

NTNU People involved in the 2004 project

NOTUR Compentency projects on GRID, Cluster and Storage Technologies

	Jørn Amundsen -- ITEA/IDI PhD in Applied Mathematics (advisor: Syvert Nørsett) Aug. 204 - Dec. 2005: Dr. Elster's replacement at IDI while she is on maternity and sabbatic leaves.

	Snorre Boasson -- MS Student, IDI, NTNU Master Thesis topic: Parallel I/O Mr. Boasson worked in spring 2004 or the NOTUR ET 2004 cluster project on testing large application w.r.t. I/O handling which was related to his M.S. thesis completed in Summer 2004.

	Gunnar Brataas -- Post Doc, IDI (with Prof. Hughes) Expert on performance issues and modelling Helping with Storage and cluster subprojects

	Arve Dispen -- ITEA Involved with pruchasing and details related to HPC HW aquisitions (clusters and storage, especially)

	Roy Dragseth -- CC UiT -- Cluster Project Leader

	Martin Eian -- M.S. student, IDI

	Lars Eilertsen -- IDI student

	Anne C. Elster -- Assoc. Prof., IDI PhD in Electrical Engineering, Corell University (advisor: Niels Otani) Aug. 2o04 - Dec. 2005: Jørn Amundsen is Dr. Elster's replacement at IDI while she is on maternity and sabbatic leaves.

	Marius Grannas -- IDI student

	Per Holager -- IDI NTNU's leader on the cluster subproject

	Robin Holtet -- Engineer, IDI and Itea, NTNU Master Thesis topic: Communications vs. Computations in Parallel Programs Pre-MS Project: Parallel Program Modules (incl. Parallel Game of Life) Mr. Holtet was on exchange to Germany Spring 2002 where he worked with MPI. He is currently working half-time for the NTNU Computer Center which runs the main supercomputer systems in Norway, and half-time as a cluster sys. admin. for our department. He completed his M.S. thesis in July 2003 and with Elster presented a poster at SC 2003 (SC 2003 has an almost 70% rejection rate for posters this year!) He is currently heavily involved in the 2004 ET cluster project both on behalf of ITEA and IDI.

	Peter Hughes -- Professor, IDI Expert on performance issues and modelling Helping with Storage and cluster subprojects

	Trond Kandal -- M.S. student, IDI Primary focus on the grid subproject

	Tor Arvid Lund -- MS Student Project: HPC benchmarking (with Morten Rodal) MS Thesis: Porting a Monte Carlo Code from Shared Mmeory to Copmputational Clusters. Tor Arvid's Masters work was a part of the new 2004 cluster project on porting of major HPC codes from SMPs to Clusters.


	Frode Nilsen -- MS Student Project & MS thesis: Grid/cluster technologies Mr. Nilsen did his B.S. at Oslo College. He worked in the spring of 2004 on the GRID architecture for the new ET GRID prosject which is strongly related to the nedw ET Cluster prosject.


	Kjetil Nørvåg -- Assoc. Prof. -- IDI Databases and storage


	Morten Rodal -- MS Student Project: HPC benchmarking (with Tor Arvid Lund) MS thesis: Scalability of Seismic Codes on Computational Clustersters. Mr. Rodal's MS work as done in collabortation with Statoil, a major Norwegian HPC user. He work was also done as part of evaluating the port of major HPC application from SMPs to clusters as part of the 2004 ET Cluster project