Long Distance Geographically Distributed InfiniBand Based Computing

Abstract

Collaboration between multiple computing centres, referred as federated computing is becoming important pillar of High Performance Computing (HPC) and will be one of its key components in the future. To test technical possibilities of future collaboration using 100Gb optic fiber link (Connection was 900 km in length with 9ms RTT time) we prepared two scenarios of operation. In the first one, Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling (ICM) in Warsaw and Centre of Informatics - Tricity Academic Supercomputer & networK (CI-TASK) in Gdansk prepared a long distance geographically distributed computing cluster. System consisted of 14 nodes (10 nodes at ICM facility and 4 at TASK facility) connected using InfiniBand. Our tests demonstrate that it is possible to perform computationally intensive data analysis on systems of this class without substantial drop in performance for a certain type of workloads. Additionally, we show that it is feasible to use High Performance Parallex [1], high level abstraction libraries for distributed computing, to develop software for such geographically distributed computing resources and maintain desired efficiency. In the second scenario, we prepared distributed simulation-postprocessing-visualization workflow using ADIOS2 [2] and two programming languages (C++ and python). In this test we prove capabilities of performing different parts of analysis in seperate sites.