Abstract

In this talk David Abramson will discuss the infrastructure being deployed at Monash to enable High Throughput Computing (HTC). HTC provides rapid execution of large computational experiments that can be broken into a number of smaller components. This usually arises in experiments that involve parameter estimation and exploration, but also occurs in algorithms that scatter and gather computationally bound applications.

HTC has had an increasing impact on science, medicine and engineering over the years, and is currently used in a number of research projects at Monash. Here I will discuss the hardware and software infrastructure, which is built on a University wide Grid that links laboratories, clusters and data storage. Specifically, we have deployed a number of Condor pools across laboratory machines, and also linked high end clusters and a large data store with Grid fabric. The Nimrod family of tools provides seamless access to a range of these resources, and allows users to formulate complex design exploration experiments easy.

About the Speaker

David Abramson has been involved in computer architecture and high performance computing research since 1979. Prior to joining Monash University in 1997, he held appointments at Griffith University, CSIRO, and RMIT. At CSIRO he was the program leader of the Division of Information Technology High Performance Computing Program, and was also an adjunct Associate Professor at RMIT in Melbourne. He served as a program manager and chief investigator in the Co-operative Research Centre for Intelligent Decisions Systems and the Co-operative Research Centre for Enterprise Distributed Systems.

David is currently an ARC (www.arc.gov.au/) Professorial Fellow; Professor of Computer Science in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, Australia, and associate director of the Monash e-Research Centre.
David has served on committees for many conferences and workshops, and has published over 150 papers and technical documents. He has given seminars and received awards around Australia and internationally and has received over $3.6 million in research funding.

He also has a keen interest in R&D commercialization and consults for Axceleon Inc, who produce an industry strength version of Nimrod, and Guardsoft, a company focused on commercialising the Guard relative debugger.

Abramson’s current interests are in high performance computer systems design and software engineering tools for programming parallel, distributed supercomputers and stained glass windows.