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TG 11 UV Tutorial

Getting the Most out of the TG SGI Altix UV Systems at TG 11


Date: July 18-21, 2011
Time: 8 am to 12 noon

Abstract: The SGI Altix UV has an SMP architecture that allows large amounts of memory to be accessed from a single thread of execution. This allows researchers a way to approach some computational problems that are not well-suited for clusters and distributed memory systems. Currently, three SGI Altix UV systems have been deployed on the TeraGrid: Blacklight at PSC, Ember at NCSA, and Nautilus at RDAV. This tutorial will include an overview of the architecture of these systems, with an emphasis on NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) and how to place processes in a way that maximizes performance. We will also describe strategies for developing code for these systems, including development case studies, approaches to parallelism, memory management and the GRU. Finally we will give an overview of available performance tools and how they can be used to achieve optimizations. This tutorial is ideal for researchers whose computational work would benefit from the large memory available on the SGI Altix UV.