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RDAV Update

Sean Ahern – Director of the UT RDAV CenterScience Advisory Board Meeting19-20 July 2010

Executive summary• RDAV resources (Nautilus) are currently in the allocations system, and

several requests have been made.• Largest of which is from Jim Kinter, here at the SAB meeting

• Though much of our hardware and software is in place and ready to go,engineering delays from SGI have pushed our timeline for full deployment out.

• This SGI UltraViolet is one of the first off the assembly line.• More I/O bandwidth than any other UltraViolet system ordered (30-50 GB/s).• Current full availability timeframe is the middle of August.

• We continue to pursue early customer activities and educational opportunities.

Hardware status• Nautilus: Engineering delays from SGI have pushed our full acceptance date

back a few weeks.• 1/4 of the full UltraViolet machine is going through acceptance testing now and

seems to be working well.• The rest of the UltraViolet machine arrives at NICS today (7/18/10) and will be

fully available mid August.

• Graphics cards: NVIDIA has not met their deadlines for full scalability. The timeframe for 16 Tesla S2050‘s is the fall. We decided to deliver a machine without the full GPU complement rather than further delay delivery for the NSF.

• Four prior generation NVIDIA GPUs will be available in the interim.

• Parallel filesystem: We expect to have a full 1 PB parallel filesystem available on Nautilus on August 1.

• Portal: Our portal system is operational and we are working to deploy new capabilities on it.

Software and environment status• VisIt has been ported and runs well on our smaller system.• Remote visualization systems are deployed and secure: NX, VNC• Workflow systems appear to be working.• Compiling environments work well, though we’re waiting on SGI for the full

complement (Intel compilers, primarily).• Exploring issues with job placement, NUMA aware scheduling, and GPU

scheduling through our job management system (MOAB/Torque).

RDAV Portal • Completed:

• SSH-VNC portlet for remote access to RDAV resources tested for functionality.• Integration of access to Dashboard components tested.

• Continuing work:• Teragrid authentication • Teragrid queue and account information access

• To Do:• RDAV visualization tool launcher• Semantic visualization product store• Workflow manager portlet

RDAV Portal: Main Portal

RDAV Portal: eSimMon Dashboard

Work with early users• Have staff working directly with three early users to push early

system.• Bronson Messer: Supernova simulation:

• Worked on efficiently converting large parallel data into format suitable for exploratory visualization with VisIt.

• Scripted batch processing to generate imagery for Bellerophon portal system.

• Stephen Miller: Spallation Neutron Source experiment:• Rewrote rebinning filter to process experimental data from

scattering experiments into a usable format: Datasets from 4 GB-several TB.

• Wrote custom VisIt scripts to produce visualizations to smooth workflow

• Lou Gross: National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis:

• Statistical analysis of species diversity in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

• Novel visualizations for species presence and absence predictions

Greater Smoky Mountains National parkMaxEnt prediction for Acer Saccharum

Supernova entropy

Education, Outreach, and Training activities• We taught a joint visualization class with TACC at the Petascale

Programming Environments and Tools classes on 9 July.• We will be teaching a tutorial on Nautilus usage for visualization, data

analysis, and workflow management at the TeraGrid'10 conference.