Scaling Advantage Program Available for TCS Application Development

PITTSBURGH, May 29, 2003 — The most important goal of the TCS program is to help computational scientists and engineers pose and solve research problems that can only be attacked if thousands of processors can be efficiently used together.

This is the rationale for our scheduling algorithm, which gives the highest priority to the largest of queued jobs and periodically drains the system to help large jobs find enough free processors to begin running.

To further assist our TCS users in the development of production codes and problems that will effectively and efficiently use at least 1000 processors on each single job, PSC is pleased to announce a new package of services and incentives.

It works as follows:

1. Interested users contact remarks@psc.edu with a brief request, describing the scientific problem that requires at least 1000 processors, the current state of the code (e.g. "now used on up to 128 processors"), how much development time they feel will be needed to make the code scale up, and whether they would like a PSC consultant to help with the development work.
2. PSC consultants will interact with these users to find out if they are ready to conduct benchmarking, debugging and test runs.
3. Benchmarking, debugging, development, and test runs agreed upon by this process will be discounted by 50%. A PSC consultant will assure that these runs execute expeditiously, arranging for reservations if required. The assigned consultant helps the user troubleshoot problems, provides advice on the use of debugging and performance analysis tools and procedures, and offers suggestions on fixes and optimizations. This phase is expected to take no longer than 4 weeks for each selected project.

This program is available effective immediately.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh together with the Westinghouse Electric Company. It was established in 1986 and is supported by several federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry.

Contacts:

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
remarks@psc.edu

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