HPC solution stack on OpenPOWER
Published on Monday 19 January 2015
Introduction to Authors
Bin Xu: Male, IBM STG China, advisory software engineer, PCM architect, mainly focus on High Performance Computing and Software Define environment.
Jing Li: Male, IBM STG China, development manager for PCM/PHPC.
Background
OpenPOWER will be one of major platforms used in all kinds of industry area, especially in High Performance Computing (HPC). IBM Platform Cluster Manager (PCM) is the most popular cluster management software aiming to simplify the system and workload management in data center.
Challenges
As a brand new platform based on IBM POWER technology, the customer is asking if their end to end applications even total solutions can be well running on OpenPOWER.
Our experience: This demo will show the capability of IBM OpenPOWER that can be the foundation of the complicated High Performance Computing complete solution. From the HPC cluster deployment, job scheduling, system management, application management to the science computing workloads on top of them, all these components can be well constructed on top of IBM OpenPOWER platform with good usability and performance. Also this demo shows the simplicity of migrating a complete x86 based HPC stack to the OpenPOWER platform. In this demo, the Platform Cluster Manager (PCM) and xCat will serve as the deployment and management facilitators of the solution, the Platform HPC will be the total solution integrated with Platform LSF (Load Sharing Facility), Platform MPI, and other HPC related middleware, and two of the popular HPC applications will be demonstrated on this stack.
There are three steps in above:
- Admin installs the head node.
- Admin discovery other nodes and provision them to join the HPC cluster automatically.
- User runs their HPC application and monitoring the cluster on dashboard.
Benefit
Faster and easy to deploy the HPC cluster environment based on OpenPOWER technology, and provide the system management, workload management with great usability for OpenPOWER HPC.
Next Steps and Recommendations
Integration with other application in OpenPOWER environment