While I agree with the sentiment, it seems much easier to make Overture conform to the super-computer than it does trying to make the super-computer conform to Overture. When dealing with 40960 compute nodes, or 163840 processor cores, with each core running at 850 MHz and each node only having 2-4GB of DRAM, no GPU, and possible security issues, the process of rendering and using X11 can become a non-trivial task. For me the weakest link is the X11 protocol, I even prefer not to use emacs through X11 on the login nodes due to latency issues. Plus, ALCF like most super-computing facilities, has a specialized rendering cluster dedicated to visualizing results of large datasets.
I am also not sure that Perl can be compiled with the IBM XL compilers, from my experience the AIX system Perl is built using GNU compilers and if I remember correctly there is some name mangling differences due to Perl headers that prevents proper linking when using XL. I like Kyle's idea, maybe a front-end GUI could be built using the GNU compilers and generate a command file for the compute nodes to run in parallel from an Overture built using the XL compilers, minus X11 and Perl. But if is possible to get Overture running with X11 and Perl on the compute nodes that would be awesome.
Cheers, -Erik On 03/05/2012 05:41 PM, Bill Henshaw wrote:
Hi Joe,I think the best solution would be to get both the perl and X libraries built on the BGP. My standard mode of operation on Linux clusters is to run in parallel with interactive graphics while I set up the problem -- very handy for debugging.Is there a good reason that we still need to live in the stone age when running on BGP?...Bill J. P. Bernstein wrote:Hello Bill, Thank you and Kyle for the quick replies to my emails.Warning headed. I am on assignment from the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) on this effort. There is significant interest at ALCF to at least run the CG solvers on BGP (not necessarily ogen). Nevertheless, I will share your sentiment with my assigners.A question about the perl situation: my initial assessment suggested to me that perl was needed only for configuring the build and running the tests. Since perl is available on the front end, the configuration part should work. Part of my assignment is converting the perl test scripts to, e.g., python. However, your message below makes me doubt my assessment. Are the perl libs, which, as you know, are not available on the back end, needed at run time beyond the test scripts?Best, Joe .
