Show HN: AWS Infrastructure for Stanford Course in Parallel Programming(elliottslaughter.com)
elliottslaughter.com
Show HN: AWS Infrastructure for Stanford Course in Parallel Programming
https://elliottslaughter.com/2014/07/cs149-setup-tool/
5 comments
Why don't use a local virtualized solution like http://informatica.uv.es/~carlos/docencia/netinvm/ ? You can create a model of a network with preins & preconf packages.
Parallelism, as opposed to concurrency, is purely a performance consideration. With concurrency, you can actually write programs you couldn't write before. That is never the case with parallelism. The only reason to write parallel code is to make your code run faster. Given how much of a burden parallel programming is, if you're not seeing measurable performance benefit, you should just drop it and go back to your original serial code.
As a result, CS149 is a class in performance programming. Sure, if you only wanted to teach how to program in each programming model, then you could virtualize everything and run locally. But if you want meaningful, predictable performance, you had better provide hardware where it is possible to achieve the performance you're asking for.
Even the larger AWS node sizes can be suboptimal for our purposes. The networks on AWS, for example, would be too high latency, low bandwidth, and unpredictable for use with typical MPI applications. Even their dedicated cluster instances still go through 10 Gbps Ethernet, with performance that continually lags behind the specialized networks used in modern supercomputers. So if we gave students an MPI assignment, we wouldn't be teaching them what the actual state of the art in the field is today.
As a result, CS149 is a class in performance programming. Sure, if you only wanted to teach how to program in each programming model, then you could virtualize everything and run locally. But if you want meaningful, predictable performance, you had better provide hardware where it is possible to achieve the performance you're asking for.
Even the larger AWS node sizes can be suboptimal for our purposes. The networks on AWS, for example, would be too high latency, low bandwidth, and unpredictable for use with typical MPI applications. Even their dedicated cluster instances still go through 10 Gbps Ethernet, with performance that continually lags behind the specialized networks used in modern supercomputers. So if we gave students an MPI assignment, we wouldn't be teaching them what the actual state of the art in the field is today.
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Great work.
When I was an undergrad (not too long ago) there are two things I always want to teach people: server provisioning and security. By provisioning I want to show people how to run an openstack environment, use vagrant, use docker and deploy using ansible/chef/puppet/salt/fabric/shell script. Show them the complexity of deploying production and development environment.
Many schools today use very traditional VMs, mostly powered by VMWare / Virtualbox. But most of the system admins are too caught up helping other faulty and departments. Most of the time the IT is underfunded. Everyone wants new computer and a new lab; admins don't have time to sit in their office to learn new technology unless they are told to do so.
I encourage students to volunteer to help their system admins, encourage them to look at the possibility of running an environment similar to openstack. I am sure by this time the system admin's lab is full of old computers ready to be recycle or to be destroyed. Those machines can be used to bootup lightweight VMs (think dockers).
When I was an undergrad (not too long ago) there are two things I always want to teach people: server provisioning and security. By provisioning I want to show people how to run an openstack environment, use vagrant, use docker and deploy using ansible/chef/puppet/salt/fabric/shell script. Show them the complexity of deploying production and development environment.
Many schools today use very traditional VMs, mostly powered by VMWare / Virtualbox. But most of the system admins are too caught up helping other faulty and departments. Most of the time the IT is underfunded. Everyone wants new computer and a new lab; admins don't have time to sit in their office to learn new technology unless they are told to do so.
I encourage students to volunteer to help their system admins, encourage them to look at the possibility of running an environment similar to openstack. I am sure by this time the system admin's lab is full of old computers ready to be recycle or to be destroyed. Those machines can be used to bootup lightweight VMs (think dockers).
Hi Elliott, I remember you TAing the class when I took it. I really enjoyed working on the assignments, thanks for the great work!
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it!
Also, why not use something based on OpenCL, which would be compatible with many student's own computers rather than requiring nvidia, so they could do that part of the exercise in PyOpenCL or maybe even node-webcl or something.