[Colloquium] Talk by Daniel Nurmi, University of California - Santa Barbara on February 27, 2008

[caseyk]

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Date: Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Place: Ryerson 251, 1100 E. 58th Street

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Speaker:	Daniel Nurmi

From:		University of California - Santa Barbara

Web Page:	http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~nurmi/

Title:  Statistical Virtualization of Resources for High Performance  
Computing

Abstract:	 Users of high performance computing (HPC) systems generally  
rely on concurrency to achieve performance. Modern users have the  
ability to draw from a vast array of distributed HPC resources due to  
the ever increasing quality of software and networks that connect  
these resources. However, as the pool of resources available to users  
grows, so does the level of resource heterogeneity and performance  
response dynamism. In this talk, I will discuss a new technique that  
uses statistical methodologies to manage resource performance  
dynamism, and virtualization techniques to abstract away resource  
heterogeneity. In particular, I will show how we have successfully  
applied the idea of “statistical virtualization” to manage the  
dynamism found in both provisioning delay and availability of HPC  
resources, and have been able to provide our solution to the HPC  
community as a generally applicable service. Finally, I will outline  
the next steps that are required before a fully statistically  
virtualized HPC resource can be realized, and discuss some of the  
challenges we face in pursuit of this goal.

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Host:	Ian Foster