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Advanced Compilers and Architectures

Spring 2013

Lecturers: Prof. Dr. Harry Wijshoff, Dr. Erwin Bakker
Assistant: Kristian Rietveld.

Advanced Compilers and Architectures (ACA) is a free format course. The exact contents of the course differ each year and build on the courses Computer Architecture, Compiler Construction and Operating Systems.

In the context of this year's Advanced Compilers and Architectures class, the students will have to develop a software infrastructure for the Leiden Zipper. The Leiden Zipper is a bridge architecture between the DAS-4 cluster and the LGM machine. DAS-4 at Leiden University comprises 16 nodes with two quad-core CPUs and 48GB of memory. LGM, the Little Green Machine, is a cluster machine containing nodes with two high-end GPUs each. The Leiden Zipper consists out of four super nodes, each having two high-end CPUs as well as four top-of-the-line GPUs (NVidia Kepler), which are wired directly into both the DAS-4 and the LGM InfiniBand interconnects and Gigabit Ethernet networks. Furthermore, the Leiden Zipper includes a headnode with a supporting filesystem. The Leiden Zipper is currently being purchased, so by the time the class starts the bare hardware will be available. Therefore, the nodes can only be booted as part of the LGM infrastructure or as part of the DAS-4 infrastructure. The goal of the class is to enable the Leiden Zipper to be part of either cluster without rebooting or to combine DAS-4, LGM and the Zipper nodes to form one large cluster computer. Participating in the class enables students to learn about large scale compute infrastructures being used in data centers as well as getting hands-on experience in implementation issues.

Students who are interested in the class are requested to send an e-mail to krietvel (at) liacs.nl.

We meet every Monday at 15:45 in room 405.

Material

Course material consists of hand-outs of recent articles.

Examination

Examination will most likely consist out of a paper presentation and a project.

Contact

You can reach us by sending e-mail to krietvel (at) liacs.nl or drop by in room 142.

Schedule


DateContents
February 4, 2013Introduction
February 10, 2013Before 23:59, send your proposition of your individual contribution to this course (1 page A4) to krietvel (at) liacs.nl. Everybody who plans to participate in the course, both as a seminar or project, should submit a proposition. If no proposition is received, it is assumed that you will not participate. After receiving the propositions we will send out invitations for interviews.
February 11, 2013No class
February 18, 2013First meeting
February 25, 2013TBA
March 4, 2013TBA
March 11, 2013TBA
March 18, 2013TBA
March 25, 2013TBa
April 1, 2013No class
April 8, 2013TBA
April 15, 2013TBA
April 22, 2013TBA
April 29, 2013TBA
May 6, 2013TBA

Overview of cluster hardware specifications

DAS-4

DAS-4 consists out of 6 clusters at 5 locations. The configuration of the cluster differs from location to location. At LIACS, the DAS-4 consists out of 16 compute nodes with the following configuration:
  • 2 Xeon E5620 CPUs (quad-core, 2.4GHz)
  • 48GB main memory
  • 10TB hard disk and 0.5TB SSD per node (local storage)
  • InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet networking
Next to these compute nodes, a head node is present with a storage capacity of 50 TB.

Litte Green Machine

The LGM compute nodes have the following configuration:
  • 2 Xeon X5650 CPUs (six-core, HyperThreaded, 2.66 GHz, 12MB cache)
  • 24GB main memory
  • 2 TB hard disk
  • 2 GPUs, a variety of NVidia Geforce 480 and Tesla C2050 GPUs are installed
  • InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet networking
A head node is present providing a total of 18,5 TB of storage.

Leiden Zipper

The Leiden Zipper will consist out of 4 compute node, configured as follows:
  • 2 Xeon E5-2600 CPUs (8 cores, 2.0 GHz, 20MB cache)
  • 64GB RAM
  • 4 Tesla K20 GPUs (5GB memory each)
  • 10 TB hard disk and 0.5TB SSD (local storage)
  • Connected to both the DAS4 and LGM InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet networks
The head node will provide a total storage capacity of 96 TB and is also wired into both the LGM and DAS4 networks.

Links

DAS-4 Website

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