How to Cope With All That
Mess?
- Fritz Ferstl, CTO Univa Corporation

HPC Data Center Evolution
Fresh from SC13:
• CPUs
o More cores, more options
• Memory
o Architectures and hierarchies
• Energy
o Power-down on demand and manage heat
• Accelerators
o More widespread, more per server
o Accelerator or pseudo server?
• Storage
o Topologies and file systems
• Network
o Topologies
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2

CPU Trends
• Continued trajectory – more cores
o Remember big-ass, enterprise SMP servers in the late 1990s early 2000s?
o Needed a lot of management for each …
• Core binding & memory binding ever more
important
• Increased use of micro-virtualization
o (CGROUPS, Linux Containers)
o The death of heavy-weight virtualization for HPC?
• New player ARM?
o Maybe not for high-end HPC but for high capacity computing
o Or when paired with accelerators like GPUs
• Application-specific servers?
o See HP’s Moonshot
Copyright © 2013 Univa Corporation, All Rights Reserved.
3

Memory
•
•
•
•
Per-socket NUMA
Server-wide ccNUMA
Virtual shared memory?
Distributed and Hadoop-like
access?
• Need to manage more
& different hierarchy levels?
Copyright © 2013 Univa Corporation, All Rights Reserved.
4

Energy
• Switch off cores or CPUs when feasible
• Move them into power saving modes
o Even between application stop/start cycles?
• Vacate racks to power them down during
phases with lower demand
• Identify hot-spots in a rack and avoid further
heat increase by diverting workloads
o Or even decrease heat by migrating workloads
Copyright © 2013 Univa Corporation, All Rights Reserved.
5

Accelerators
• More accelerators per server node
• Concurrent applications per accelerator card
• Accelerators as pseudo, stand-alone
servers?
• Application-specific accelerators?
Copyright © 2013 Univa Corporation, All Rights Reserved.
6

Storage
• A few, beefy filers or shared filesystems
• Is there a place for HDFS?
o As Big Data evolves?
o Even in HPC?
• Trends in distributed, high-performance file
systems?
• What about NFS? pNFS?
Copyright © 2013 Univa Corporation, All Rights Reserved.
7

Networking
• Is it business as usual and just ever more
bandwith and shorter latency?
• Or are there topology trends:
o Sparser interconnects requiring more topology/proximity awareness?
• Is there a disconnect between commercial
requirements and research/gov?
o Will enterprises ever invest in ultra-large interconnects?
o Do they have applications scaling to such levels?
Copyright © 2013 Univa Corporation, All Rights Reserved.
8

Thank You!
fferstl@univa.com
http://www.univa.com/