VT GPGPU/DraftSurvey

EGI User Community GPGPU Survey

Overview

The use of General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) or accelerator devices, such as Intel's Xeon Phi co-processor, over the past few years has resulted in a huge increase in their exploitation by all the major scientific disciplines. With three of the top 10 clusters in the current June 2012 Top500 supercomputers list using NVIDIA GPGPUs, we would expect the number of GPGPU deployments at grid resource centres to grow significantly over the next few years. Moreover

The purpose of this survey is to gauge how the users currently use, or intend to use, GPGPUs or other accelerated devices in Grid or hybrid Grid/Cloud environments, or whether they shall use grids for this purpose. In particular, we would like to determine if there is a specific need from the User Communities for a more tightly integrated GPGPU capability within the grid environment. In addition, we welcome further user comments and feedback on any other aspects.

All data collected from the survey feedback will be processed anonymously.

User Profile

Q1 Which Scientific Discipline do you work in? ANS: Text

Q2 Do you currently use grid or cloud technologies? ANS: Yes or No

Q3 Do you use GPGPU based applications for your scientific computations (on a local cluster, other type of resources)? ANS: Yes or No

Q4 If you use GPGPU computation, what it is the speed-up achieved compared with not-parallel computing? ANS: Text

Q5 If you are not currently using GPGPUs, do you intend to use them within the next 18 months (if possible, please indicate when: Next 3 Months, Next 6 Months, Next 12 Months etc) - ANS: Yes + timeframe (optional) or No

Q6 Would you like to access GPGPU based resources through the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) ? ANS: Yes or No

Q7 Do you develop or intend to develop any GPGPU based applications? ANS: Yes or No

Application Development

Please Answer this section if you have answered yes to Q5.

Q8 What Application Programming Interface do/will you use? (e.g. CUDA, OpenCL, OpenACC, or Other) ANS; Text

Q9 Do you intend to develop code which depends on other application frameworks (e.g MPI, BLAST etc). If Yes, then please list an example. ANS; Yes + optional text or No

Resource Centres GPGPU administration

These questions are intended to be answered by Resource Centre Administrators. The goal here is determine how widespread GPGPUs are (or will be) provided in the infrastructure; how the site administrators configure these resources in the batch system/scheduler; allocation policies; how these GPGPU are made visible on the grid infrastructure, etc.

Q10 Does your site currently provide GPGPU resources or does it intend to provide GPGPU resources? ANS; Yes + optional text or No

Q11 Which LRMS (i.e batch system and job scheduler do you use)

Q12. How the GPU resources are seen from LRMS point of view:

a) manually configured consumable resource

b) the GPU management is natively supported by the LRMS

c) the LRMS is not aware of GPUs (i.e. user have to request whole node to get exclusive access to GPUs)

d) other?

Q13 Does every node has GPU or only a subset of them? ANS:YES/NO

Q14 Is access to GPGPU-enabled hosts restricted to specific users or groups?

Q15: Link to hardware description (number of GPU nodes, type of GPU devices, number of cards per node). ANS:TEXT

Q16: Link to end-user documentation (i.e. how to submit a GPU job). ANS:Text

Q17: Did you implement some additional mechanism to manage access to GPU devices (e.g. custom prolog/epilog scripts,http://sourceforge.net/projects/cudawrapper/, ...)? ANS:TEXT