[Users] Cactus newsletter

[Jian Tao]

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Summary:
========
1. Cactus Showcased at SC07
2. Cactus Run on First Loongson 2F Chinese Cluster
3. Cactus Benchmarks Run on Ranger
4. First XiRel Workshop (Baton Rouge, Jan 23 - 25, 2008)
5. Significant Improvements of Carpet
6. Upcoming Event: Cactus Tutorial at LSU HPC Workshop
7. Opening Positions

* The next newsletter will be posted in early June. If you have
any Cactus related events or announcements that you want to add to
the next newsletter please send them to cactusmaint at cactuscode.org.

Contents:
=========
1. Cactus Showcased at SC07

The Cactus Computational Toolkit has been showcased again by the Center 
for Computation & Technology(CCT) researchers at the annual 
Supercomputing Conference 2007 (SC07) from Reno, Nevada. SC07 is an 
international conference on high performance computing, networking, 
storage and analysis.

(http://www.cactuscode.org/News/CactusSC07)

2. Cactus Run on First Loongson 2F Chinese Cluster

On December 26, 2007, China revealed its first supercomputer of 1 
TFlop/s utilizing the domestic Chinese CPU Loongson 2F at Hefei, 
designated as KD-50-I. This supercomputer was designed by a joint team 
led by Dr. Chen Guoliang, professor of the Computer Science and 
Technology Department of the University of Science and Technology of 
China (the primary contractor, with the Research Institute of 
Computational Technology of Chinese Academy of Sciences as the secondary 
contractor). With the help of the system administrator Huimin Li, we 
compiled and benchmarked Cactus on the cluster.

(http://kd50.ustc.edu.cn/)
(http://www.cactuscode.org/News/CactusLoongson)

3. Cactus Benchmarks Run on Ranger

Cactus tested on Ranger, the new 60,000 core supercomputer at TACC
The Cactus group at LSU successfully ported the Cactus framework to 
Ranger, the new 60,000 core supercomputer at TACC, and ran a series of 
numerical relativity benchmarks there. We are happy to report that these 
benchmarks scale up to 4096 cores, the maximum job size possible while 
Ranger is still in "friendly user" mode. Ranger is one of the largest 
computational resources in the world, consisting of 3,936 16-way SMP 
compute-nodes with 123 TByte of memory, and with a theoretical peak 
performance of 504 TFlop/s.

(http://www.carpetcode.org/)
(http://www.cactuscode.org/News/Ranger)

4. First XiRel Workshop (Baton Rouge, Jan 23 - 25, 2008)

The Center for Computation & Technology held the first XiRel workshop 
that brought together researchers from LSU, Rochester Institute of 
Technology, Pennsylvania State University, and the Albert-Einstein 
Institute from Germany.

(http://www.cct.lsu.edu/XiRel/)
(http://www.cactuscode.org/News/XiRelWorkshop08)

5. Significant Improvements of Carpet

Significant improvements were contributed to the development version of 
Carpet on March 1,2008. Thanks to more efficient data structures and 
algorithms, Carpet is now able to scale to more than 8,000 cores. 
Special thanks go to Luca Baiotti, Denis Pollney, Christian Reisswig, 
Jian Tao, and also to the CCT numerical relativity group, the AEI 
numerical relativity group, and the XiRel collaboration.

More information about the improvements can be found at 
http://www.carpetcode.org/

6. Upcoming Event: Cactus Tutorial at LSU HPC Workshop

HPC @ LSU will hold a High Performance Computing Workshop on March 11 & 
12 in Frey 307 at LSU in Baton Rouge. This workshop will also be held on 
the Access Grid so that TeraGrid and LONI users on remote sites may 
attend. Erik Schnetter is scheduled to give a tutorial on Cactus for 
potential Cactus users starting at 3:00PM on March 12.

(http://www.hpc.lsu.edu/training/20080311/index.php)


7. Opening Positions

There are several Cactus related open positions for postdocs and 
graduate students at LSU through the XiRel, Alpaca, CyberTools and other 
projects. Please contact Gabrielle Allen at gallen at cct.lsu.edu for more 
information.

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   ___|            |                 \  |
  |      _` |  __| __| |   |  __|     \ |  _ \ \  \   / __|
  |     (   | (    |   |   |\__ \   |\  |  __/\ \  \ /\__ \
\____|\__,_|\___|\__|\__,_|____/  _| \_|\___| \_/\_/ ____/
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