[FRIAM] Practical Parallelism

[Douglas Roberts]

Owen:

I'm all for practical.  But first, show us your requirements.  A "step or
two towards higher performance" is a bit vague.  ;-}

What's your goal:  16 million agents, simulated at 80X real time?

Or something less.  Or something more.

Joking aside,

What are your requirements?  How much do you need to scale now; how far do
you need to scale eventually, how soon do you need to do it, what are your
agent complexities, output requirements, data I/O needs, post processing
requirements, what existing designs do you have now, and what are their
limitations, what is the memory footprint for your existing implementation,
what are your current run times, etc. etc. etc...

System requirements should come first;  these will lead to suggestions for
SW & HW implementation environments.

--Doug
-- 
Doug Roberts, RTI International
droberts at rti.org
doug at parrot-farm.net
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell

On 10/7/06, Owen Densmore <owen at backspaces.net> wrote:
>
> On Oct 7, 2006, at 10:29 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
> > Turns out there is a poll being taken on some mail lists on the topic
> > of new parallel hardware and if/how it will be used:
> >    Parallelism: the next generation -- a small survey
> >    http://www.nabble.com/A-small-survey-tf2337745.html
> >
> >      -- Owen
>
> OK, so we've had an interesting interchange on Distribution /
> Parallelization of ABM's.  But what I'm interested is a bit more
> practical:
>
> Given what *we* want to do, and given the recent advances in desktop,
> workstation, and server computing, and given our experiences over the
> last year with things like the Blender Render Farm .. what would be
> the most reasonable way for us to take a step or two toward higher
> performance?
>    - Should we consider buying a fairly high performance linux box?
>    - How about buying a multi-processor/multi-core system?
>    - Do we want to consider a shared Santa Fe Super Cluster?
>    - What public computing facilities could we use?
>
> And possibly more to the point:
>    - What computing architecture are we interested in?
>
> I'll say from my experience, I'm mainly interested two approaches:
>
>    - Unix based piped systems where I don't have to consider the
> architecture in my programs, only in the way I use sh/bash to execute
> them to make sure they work well in parallel.  In plain words: good
> parameter scanning, or piped tasks (model, visualize, render) using
> built-in unix piping mechanisms with parallel execution of the
> programs.  I've done this in the past with dramatic increase in
> elapsed times.  And its dead simple.
>
>    - Java or similar based multi-threaded approaches where I need a
> bit of awareness in my code as to how I approach parallelism, but
> *the language supports it*.  I'm not very much interested in exotic
> and difficult to maintain grid/cluster architectures, I'm not at all
> convinced for the scale we're approaching that they make sense.  And,
> yes, Java is good enough.
>
> In other words, given Redfish, Commodicast, and other local
> scientific computing endeavors, what would be interesting systems for
> our scale of computing?  I.e. reasonable increase in power with
> modest change in architecture.
>
> Owen
>
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