1. 4 November 2008NGS Innovation Forum '08 11 NGS Clearspeed Resources Clearspeed and other accelerator hardware on the NGS Steven Young Oxford NGS Manager

2. NGS Innovation Forum '08 4 November 2008 22 Overview Info and recipes for using the NGS Clearspeed Resources Pointers to other accelerator resources that are going to be available to NGS users

3. NGS Innovation Forum '084 November 2008 33 NGS Clearspeed Resources Hardware –4 x Clearspeed X620 cards The cards were purchased as part of the NGS2 core site hardware procurement. One card at each core site (STFC, Manchester, Leeds, Oxford) The cards are now all situated at Oxford and are housed in the Oxford NGS2 cluster Software –Clearspeed Software Development Kit 4-seat license

4. NGS Innovation Forum '084 November 2008 44 NGS Clearspeed Resources (2) What does a Clearspeed card do? –Clearspeed multicore floating point accelerators –96 processing elements –64bit floating point –Low power (FLOPS per watt)

5. NGS Innovation Forum '084 November 2008 5 How to connect… Connect to ngs.oerc.ox.ac.uk (by gsissh) To get an interactive session on one of the clearspeed nodes: qsub -q clearspeed -I

6. NGS Innovation Forum '084 November 2008 6 How to run code… Use the ClearSpeed math library, CSXL, to use accelerated versions of some BLAS and LAPACK routines –No user code changes required. –Code needs to be linked to appropriate CSXL library –Code needs to be run with correct LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable –The ClearSpeed variable CS_HOST_BLAS needs to be set pointing to the underlying BLAS libraries for functions that aren’t implemented in CSXL

7. NGS Innovation Forum '084 November 2008 7 How to compile code… Clearspeed processors are SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) Clearspeed card programming is via the language C n which introduces two new keywords: mono and poly The Clearspeed SDK includes a compiler (cscn), a debugger (csgdb)

8. NGS Innovation Forum '084 November 2008 8 How to submit jobs… MODULE set up qsub –q clearspeed script.sh globus-job-run –q clearspeed...

9. NGS Innovation Forum '084 November 2008 9 What else can I do? Lots of things are possible… –Accelerating other standard applications which use BLAS, LAPACK: Matlab, Mathematica Subject to licensing restrictions –Installation of applications for which ClearSpeed customisation has been done: Amber, Molpro Subject to licensing restrictions –Write code to use the Clearspeed Discrete Fourier Transform accelerator library

10. NGS Innovation Forum '084 November 2008 10 Further information Clearspeed website: www.clearspeed.com support.clearspeed.com/documentation/overview Manuals are also available on ngs.oerc.ox.ac.uk:/usr/local/Cluster-Docs/clearspeed/ CSXL User Guide Clearspeed SDK Introductory Programming Manual Documentation pages will be available at: www.ngs.ac.uk/sites/ox/clearspeed/

11. NGS Innovation Forum '084 November 2008 11 Other resources Many-core and Reconfigurable Supercomputing Network –http://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/research/many-core- and-reconfigurable-supercomputinghttp://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/research/many-core- and-reconfigurable-supercomputing HPC-SIG Novel Architecture Focus Group

12. NGS Innovation Forum '084 November 2008 12 Other resources (2) Distributed Computing Group at Daresbury –Clearspeed CATS system –IBM Cell System 24 QS22 (double precision latest generation) Cell blades coupled to 4 JS22 POWER6 blades with Infiniband –GPU-accelerated cluster to be procured The NGS will be working with Daresbury to provide grid interfaces to these systems.

13. 4 November 2008NGS Innovation Forum '08 13 Discussion Any questions or comments?