Systems Software Projects

While IBM will provide a solid high-performance computing environment for Blue Waters, Illinois and other members of the Great Lakes Consortium will enhance IBM's HPC environment to ensure that applications can take full advantage of Blue Waters' hardware capabilities to achieve high sustained performance. In addition, the enhanced HPC environment aims to increase the productivity of application developers, system administrators, and researchers by providing an integrated toolset to use, analyze, monitor and control the behavior of Blue Waters.

Computational Libraries: This project will ensure that the computational libraries needed to support the applications, which have been pre-allocated time on Blue Waters, perform well at the required scale. The libraries needed to support the pre-allocated applications will be identified and ported and tuned for Blue Waters, in collaboration with the library developers. Contact: William Gropp, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wgropp@illinois.edu.

Cactus: Cactus, an open-source component-based framework for HPC parallel application development that supports large-scale science and engineering applications and collaborative development teams, is being evaluated for use on Blue Waters. It is representative of a class of application frameworks that can help abstract new programming methodologies and technologies to enable petascale applications. Contact: Gabrielle Allen, Center for Computation & Technology, gallen@cct.lsu.edu.

GPFS+HPSS: The GPFS and HPSS software stacks must each work individually, and then work together transferring data between them. To provide this capability, NCSA will add a RAIT capability to HPSS and an I/O import/export capability for data flowing into and out of Blue Waters. RAIT is needed to ensure data integrity and the import/export capability to allow for scheduling of reliable data transfers into or out of the machine. Contact: Michelle Butler, NCSA, mbutler@ncsa.uiuc.edu.

Integrated Application Development Environment: An Eclipse-based code development/debug/optimization/deployment/computational experiment environment is being developed to aid in the process of creating applications to achieve petascale science on Blue Waters. The integration effort will also work to ensure that widely used community performance and debugging tools are available on Blue Waters. Contact: Jay Alameda, NCSA, jalameda@ncsa.uiuc.edu.

Integrated Systems Console: A comprehensive system management environment is being developed to provide the integration necessary to support a system at this scale. The system-management environment will coordinate system monitoring, checkpointing, RAID-recovery, and interconnect-reconfiguration activities and will present a unified, visual command/observation interface to the system administration team. Contact: John Towns, NCSA, jtowns@ncsa.uiuc.edu.

Performance Tools: Methods and tools are being developed for coping with scale and complexity in understanding program and system behavior on Blue Waters. Low-overhead agents will be used on each processing element to collect data and perform local pre-analyses, including data compression and reduction, to limit system-level impact. The local data is then subjected to a variety of hierarchical data-reductions and analyses within a tool communication infrastructure. Contact: Robert J. Fowler, Renaissance Computing Institute, rjf@renci.org.

Photran Eclipse: Photran, which is part of the Parallel Tools Platform (PTP), will be extended to support Fortran 2003 and Fortran 2008 as well as debugging of parallel programs. Contact: Ralph Johnson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, rjohnson@illinois.edu.

System Simulator: BigSim, a whole-system simulator for early application development and identification of performance problems, is being combined with IBM's POWER7 chip simulator to model the performance of application on Blue Waters. The integrated simulator will be made available on NCSA's interim systems, along with associated documentation and user tutorials. Contact: Laxmikant Kale, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, kale@illinois.edu.

Workflow System: Ensemble Broker and system-local workflow systems are being extended to work with Blue Waters. This software will provide advanced capabilities for users to compose multi-level graphs (orchestrating multiple job submissions, for instance as high level, and system-local orchestration). The Ensemble Broker graphical user interface will be integrated into the Eclipse Integrated Application Development Environment in order to provide support for the job execution cycle. Contact: Jay Alameda, NCSA, jalameda@ncsa.uiuc.edu.