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NGS Clearspeed ResourcesClearspeed and other accelerator

hardware on the NGS

Steven Young<steven.young@oerc.ox.ac.uk>

Oxford NGS Manager

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Overview

• Info and recipes for using the NGS Clearspeed Resources

• Pointers to other accelerator resources that are going to be available to NGS users

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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How to compile code…

• Clearspeed processors are SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data)

• Clearspeed card programming is via the language Cn which introduces two new keywords: mono and poly

• The Clearspeed SDK includes a compiler (cscn), a debugger (csgdb)

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How to submit jobs…

• MODULE set up

qsub –q clearspeed script.sh

globus-job-run –q clearspeed ...

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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

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Further information

• Clearspeed website: www.clearspeed.com

support.clearspeed.com/documentation/overview

• Manuals are also available onngs.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/

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Other resources

• Many-core and Reconfigurable Supercomputing Network– http://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/research/many-core-

and-reconfigurable-supercomputing

• HPC-SIG Novel Architecture Focus Group

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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.

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Discussion

Any questions or comments?