Performance and Evaluation

Business meeting

T here were some changes in deputy chair and Cray liason positions for the Performance and Evaluation Special Interest Group at this CUG. Raghurama "Reddy" Reddy (Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center) decided shortly before the meeting that he needed to step down from his deputy chair position because of the funding changes at PSC. So I went looking for deputies (again) at this meeting, and this time I found TWO. Bruce Kelly (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) was selected and approved as the new Americas Deputy. Michael Resch (Rechenzentrum der Universitaet Stuttgart) was selected and approved as the new European deputy.

Bill Harrod (SGI/Cray) has been doing double duty for the P&E and Software Tools Special Interest Committees for quite some time now, and it was time for P&E to find its own liason. Jeff Brooks (SGI/Cray) has agreed to shoulder the burden.

I'd like to publicly thank both Reddy and Bill for their support for CUG and their assistance in setting up the program for this meeting. They've both done a fine job for CUG, and I hope you'll join me in thanking them for their service. I'll still look forward to seeing them both at future CUGs. Also, a warm welcome to Michael, Bruce, and Jeff. I'm looking forward to working with each of you.

I'll be making the adjustments to the P&E SIG home page (available from the CUG home page at www.cug.org), so if you have any suggestions, please send them soon.

Technical sessions

T his CUG, the P&E SIG continued a tradition of excellence with nine superb papers presented in its technical sessions. The papers covered a broad range of interests and were broken into three sessions. Here's a summary of the titles and authors (see the Proceedings for the complete papers).

Tuesday afternoon

• "Performance Evaluation of Communications and Computations on the CRAY T3E" -- C. Calvin and L. Colombet, CGCV

• "Experiences in Data Parallel Programming on Cray MPP Machines" -- J-Y Berthou and L. Colombet, CGCV

• "Applications Performance on the Cray T3E and T3E-900" -- Nick Nystrom, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

Wednesday morning

• "Should Users Run Workstation Jobs on Supercomputers?" -- Victor Hazlewood and Allen B. Downey, San Diego Supercomputing Center

• "Comparing the Performance and Features of CRAY T3E, Cray PVP, and Cray Scalable Node Systems" -- Kent Koeninger, SGI/Cray Research

• "Performance Issues of Intercontinental Computing" -- Bruce Loftis, Pittsburg Supercomputing Center, and Micheal Resch, RUS

Friday morning

• "A survey of Scalability Techniques: Examples of Various Approaches to High-Performance Computing through Scalable Systems" -- Kent Koeninger, SGI/Cray Research

• "MARQUISE: An Embedded High-Performance Computer Demonstration"

• "Honey, I Shrunk the Cray!" -- Candace S. Culhane, Department of Defense, and Paul J. Boudreaux, University of Maryland

I'd like to thank each of the authors and speakers for their fine work. Great job everyone!

Report on the Summer '98 meeting in Stuttgart, Germany

The preparations are well under way for the next CUG conference in Stuttgart, Germany, for the summer of 1998. We would like to encourage you to attend. Walter Wehinger assures me that this will be a CUG to remember!

The P&E SIG is seeking input in several areas for the Stuttgart CUG. We will be soliciting abstracts for performance and evaluation papers to be presented in Stuttgart. The deadline for submission of an abstract will be in late 1997 for the Summer '98 meeting. We'd like to hear your ideas for papers as well as your suggestions on what you think would be interesting papers. I hope you will attending to share your problems, solutions, work, and ideas with the rest of us.

Several individuals from U.S. sites explained that it is difficult for them to obtain approval from their management to attend CUG meetings overseas and expressed concern that they would not be able to attend a CUG meeting until spring 1999 in Minneapolis. We are seeking suggestions on how the SIG (and CUG) can help these sites. Additionally, as chair, I am willing to represent well-defined issues on behalf of CUG member sites to SGI/Cray Research. Issues raised through CUG have a good track record of being resolved in a timely fashion.

We're examining revamping the format of the business meeting to make these hour-long meetings more useful to the conference attendees, and we're also looking for input on agenda items. If you have comments, send them to us!

If you have comments or suggestions on any of these, I can be contacted at kuehn@ucar.edu. (It is helpful if the first four characters of the message subject are "CUG:".)

Mark your calendar for this meeting, and stay tuned for further information!