Cluster Computing - Preliminary List of Projects

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Implementation and Research Projects

Implement the following software packages on the Cluster Ohio cluster or the research cluster. Carefully document any problems and issues in impementation, and any other packages which you need to deploy first. Write a report detailing these issues, and a description of the purpose and functionality of the packages. Credit any sources, web or otherwise used. Also prepare Powerpoint slides for a 20 to 30 minute talk on the subject. Again credit any sources.
  1. Deploy the Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software (ATLAS) software package and document the performance improvements achieved using it.
  2. Deploy ScaLAPACK and test it and write a report on the process and performance.

Research Projects

Search the literature on one of the following topics and produce a 10 to 15 page report with a summary of the reference material and URL or citation of the literature. Remember to correctly credit the source for any material.

Also produce Powerpoint slides for a 20 to 30 minute talk on the subject. Again credit any sources.

As sources for references use scholar.google.com and library databases in addition to normal web searches.

For each of these topics, you should discuss the raw performance attainable, that over TCP/IP, that over any native API, and that of MPI over any of these available. You should also summarize any research which has been done to optimize the performance of MPI collective operations and MPI-2 one sided communications (RMA). You should also discuss the implementation details where these are relevant to the performance.

  1. Checkpoint and Restart facilities and mechanisms in LAM
  2. Optimization of Collective Communications in MPI
  3. System overhead factors effecting performance on Very Large clusters
  4. Single System Image for Cluster Computing (OpenSSI)
  5. High Availibility Linux Systems and Clusters (High availability Oscar)
  6. Parallel I/O and the Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS)

farrell@cs.kent.edu