VT GPGPU

General Project Information

• Leader: John Walsh (TCD, Ireland)
• Mailing List: to be setup
• Status: Proposed
• Start Date: -
• End Date: start date + 6 months
• Meetings: -

Motivation

GPU computing or GPGPU is the use of a GPU (graphics processing unit) as a co-processor to accelerate CPUs for general purpose scientific and engineering computing. The GPU accelerates applications running on the CPU by offloading some of the compute-intensive and time consuming portions of the code. The rest of the application still runs on the CPU. From a user’s perspective, the application runs faster because it is using the massively parallel processing power of the GPU to boost performance. Experiments with the use of GPGPUs for scientific computing are already ongoing within various NGIs, existing and potential EGI user communities. This Virtual Team project aims to collect detailed requirements from existing and new EGI user communities and their support teams about using GPGPU services in the European Grid Infrastructure. The requrements will used by the EGI Operations community to define and implement extensions in the EGI e-infrastructure services in order to meet the communities demand for GPGPU computing.

Output

The project aims to produce a list of detailed user requirements for using GPGPU computing services in the European Grid Infrastructure.

Tasks

1. Collect requirements for GPGPU usage from generic and community-specific user support teams (VRCs, NGIs, VOs, projects)
2. Investigate how the collected requirements could be addressed on the production infrastructure (technologies, service configuration, policies)
3. Make a proposal for the introduction of new technologies, service configurations and policies to the production infrastructure
4. Implement the proposed technologies, configurations, policies on selected sites/VOs of EGI

Members

Leader:

• John Walsh (TCD, Ireland)

EGI.eu support:

• Karolis Eigelis (EGI.eu, Netherlands)

Members:

• Subscribe yourself or email John.Walsh@cs.tcd.ie and Karolis.Eigelis@egi.eu
• Gergely Sipos (EGI.eu)

Resources

The project is seeking for members who can help carry out the following activities, can help answer the following questions:

• Requirements, existing practices:
  • Collect requirements and best practices from existing and potential new user communities of EGI, from NGIs
• Information system:
  • Glue Schema requirements/definition and Information System plugins (Glue expert)
  • Benchmarking? What benchmark to use?
  • Capabilities - speed, #streaming cores, memory etc? (For example, to consider some of the potential capabilities, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units)
• Batch integration support:
  • Feedback on experience for i) AMD GPGPUs, and ii) LSF, (S)GE and SLURM
  • How do we ensure secure exclusive access to the GPGPUs?
  • How do we deal with multiple GPUs on a single physical card (e.g. Nvidia S2050 has 4 GPUs on single PCI-e card)?
  • Other features such as GPU peer-to-peer support?
• Accounting:
  • Do we need to extend the accounting system. Torque only reports the CPU time?
• Runtime support:
  • API frameworks, versions. What other applications are compiled against CUDA - e.g openmpi, torque?