XSEDE15

Comet is a new XSEDE HPC resource hosted and operated at SDSC. It features next-generation AVX2-capable Intel processors, Mellanox FDR InfiniBand interconnects, NVIDIA GPUs on part of the system, and Aeon high performance storage. The standard compute nodes consist of Intel Xeon E5-2680v3 (formerly codenamed Haswell) processors, 128 GB DDR4 DRAM (64 GB per socket), and 320 GB of SSD based local scratch. The GPU nodes contain four NVIDIA GPUs each. This tutorial introduces the capabilities of Comet, and has hands on material to cover the different modes of usage anticipated for the machine.
 
We begin the tutorial with detailed information on the Comet system architecture, including compute and GPU nodes, InfiniBand topology, performance storage, and virtualization. Performance comparisons between Comet and Gordon are provided for selected applications. We then follow with information on accessing Comet, transferring data to/from Comet, and the software environment.
 
The hands on section of the tutorial is divided into three sections – 1) Using the compute nodes, including examples on MPI, OpenMP, hybrid (e.g. MPI+ OpenMP), local scratch, and Hadoop jobs; 2) Using the GPU nodes with examples on using MVAPICH2-GDR (uses GPU Direct), examples CUDA, and OpenACC programming, and 3) special features on Comet including high performance virtualization, and gateway hosting options.
 
SDSC Staff will be available to meet with individual users, to further discuss usage of Comet, at the conclusion of the tutorial.