Subject: corrected minutes

From: "Michael W. Berry" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 1996 19:24:55 -0500

There were some errors in the minutes to the last meeting that I
have now corrected.  Regards,
Mike

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Minutes of ParKBench Meeting - Knoxville Hilton, October 31, 1996
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Attendee List:

     (MBa) Mark Baker          Univ. of Portsmouth   [email-masked]
     (MBe) Michael Berry       Univ. of Tennessee    [email-masked]
     (JD)  Jack Dongarra       Univ. of Tenn./ORNL   [email-masked]
     (VG)  Vladimir Getov      Univ. of Westminister [email-masked]
           Christian Halloy    Univ. of Tennessee    [email-masked]
           Adolfy Hoisie       Cornell Theory Ctr    [email-masked]
           Edgar Kalns         IBM                   [email-masked]
           Phil Mucci          Univ. of Tennessee    [email-masked]
           Erik Riedel         GENIAS Software GmbH  [email-masked]
     (SS)  Subhash Saini       NASA Ames             [email-masked]
     (RS)  Ron Sercely         Convex/HP             [email-masked]
     (ES)  Erich Strohmaier    Univ. of Tennessee    [email-masked]

At 9:05am EST, JD opened the meeting. The participants introduced
themselves and the final agenda was discussed.

At 9:20am ES gave a status report of the current release of ParkBench.
He reviewed the ParkBench structure and the changes in V2.1.1 to the
last version 2.0.  The changes to the MPI implementations of comms2
and comms3 were discussed in detail.  Further changes to comms3 were
proposed by RS. The committee decided to change the MPI and PVM
version of comms3 to model MPI_ALLTOALL communication pattern.

At 10:15am ES presented the table of results available.  The committee
reviewed selected results and discussed in detail necessary changes to
vector length and message sizes in Low Level benchmarks to reflect the
increasing memory and cache sizes.  Two parameters TOTMEM and TOTCACHE
will be used for this.  JD suggested to characterize more precisely
which measurements are performed.  He also proposed to add an
additional test for cold cache behavior to the existing ones which
only work on warm caches.  JD and ES will investigate necessary
changes to the LINALG kernels to facilitate their usage.
VG reported that a set of measurement results has recently been taken
by the low-level sequential benchmarks on a number of high-performance
workstations, including SGI-Onyx, DEC-Alpha, and SUN-Ultra2. These
results will be submitted in due course.

At 11:00am JD started the discussion about additions for the next
release.  ES reviewed the status of the old HPF Compiler test suite.
The committee agreed on generating a new set of Low Level test which
should use similar data exchange pattern as the Message Passing test.
Charles Koelbel will be contacted to help with this.  The necessity of
additional HPF test will also be investigated.

*** ACTION ITEM ***
MBa will talk with Chuck K. and others (NPAC, etc.) about assembling
the HPF codes.

At 11:15am MBa proposed to generate a similar set of tests for shared
memory programming.  The committee agreed that one sided exchange
operations like put and get would be a good first candidate for this.
The standardization of these constructs in MPI-2 would provide a good
starting point for the actual implementation.  RS indicated that he
could look into thread-based SM-type benchmarks. 

There was also a discussion about BSP and Oxford lab.  It was
suggested that this group should encourage them to complete
low-level codes which could be added to Netlib.  MBa will report
the details of this discussion to Oxford.
to Oxford the 

At 11:30am MBe reviewed the minutes from the April 26, 1996 PARKBENCH
meeting and the following corrections were made prior to
acceptance of these minutes:

"SS then presented some results on HPF-based NAS Parallel Benchmarks (PB).
He pointed out the heavy investment at NAS in CMF on the CM-2 and CM-5
(shutdown on March 1995).  He showed that for the FT
benchmarks, that the MPI versions were about 2 times faster than the
HPF versions of NAS PB Version 2.0 on the IBM SP/2.  Also
he showed that for the SP benchmark, that the MPI version was about 3
times faster than the HPF versions of NAS PB Version 2.0 on the IBM SP/2."

RS pointed out that many of the commercial benchmark codes
(MSC/NASTRAN, STARCD, ABACUS, LSDYNA, and PAMCRASH) discussed
at the April PARKBENCH meeting utilize PVM and that MPI versions
are now in beta test for most vendors.  RS also pointed out memory
referencing patterns and communication can greatly vary for such
codes for different problem sizes and datasets.

VG indicated that the PIC code (via R. Hockney) called LPM that was under
consideration for a future release of PARKBENCH is proprietary.

The group then convened for lunch at the Soup Kitchen at noon.

At 12:55pm, MBa overviewed GBIS (which is now over 2 years old).  He
compared it with the presentation of NPB results at NAS which uses
precomputed postscript graph files.  He indicated that a prototype of
the new interface for GBIS has been designed which is currently using
a DB2 database (demo planned for Supercomputing'96).  He suggested that
future work in the coupling of object databases and java graphics might
be the best approach for upcoming interfaces to PARKBENCH data.  
A more efficient mechanism is also needed for adding new PARKBENCH data.
The URL for the Database Navigator Project at the Univ. of Southampton
which has updated GBIS is available at the URL below:

     http://barrel.ecs.soton.ac.uk:8080/dbhome.html

SS indicated that NAS PB 1.0 (vendor optimized) results collected from
machines such as: NEC SX-4, Fujitsu VPP700, Hitachi SR2201, Convex 
SPP2000, SGI Origin 2000, Cray T3E, and IBM's new 135 MHz-based machine
would be released at SC'96.

He showed that for the Class A SP benchmark on 64 processors
the HPF-compiled versions (PGI, APR) were between 2 and 2.7 times
slower than the MPI versions on the IBM SP/2.  On the Cray T3D,
the HPF-compiled versions were between 1.7 and 2.2 times slower than
the optimal MPI versions.

For the Class A BT benchmark on 64 processors, the HPF-compiled
versions ranged between 1.2 and 1.5 times slower than the MPI
version.  SS, however, did point out that the vendors' optimized
MPI versions sometimes required twice the memory of the HPF-compiled
versions (trade-off in memory for speed).

SS indicated that the NPB 2.0 MPI-based versions are complete and
that the NPB 3.0 HPF-based versions of BT, SP, FT, and EP are being
prepared.  He also stressed the need for PARKBENCH to join in
the Petaflop performance modeling efforts related to applications
in climate and ocean modeling, for example.  SS also discussed the
history of nanotechonology and the principle of "writing with atoms".
He posed an important question to the group: are current benchmarks
suitable for future application-based simulations?"

At 1:55pm, JD and ES asked the group to consider reducing the
PARKBENCH group structure (low-level, kernel, compact applications,
methodology, HPF, and analysis) down to a single group.  It was
unanimous that a single PARKBENCH group be used with the electronic
mail address [email-masked] as the single channel of
communication.  ES pointed out that the webpages made need to be
changed to indicate the single group structure.

ES then suggested that a PARKBENCH bibliography be constructed
from all PARKBENCH-related publications and pointers to other
benchmarking activities.  The formation of a benchmarking
catalogue was suggested.

The group then discussed an update of the previous PARKBENCH
report (edited by Hockney and Berry).  It was decided that
a second report should detail changes in the
PARKBENCH effort and address issues in Petaflops performance
modeling.  MBa, MBe, ES, SS, and VG agreed to help produce the
second PARKBENCH report.  JD suggested that the report be ready
by Supercomputing'96.

JD and VG then commented on efforts for funding PARKBENCH activities.
JD indicated that the UT-based proposal is still in a development
phase and VG indicated that the Universities of Southampton and 
Westminster had submitted a joint proposal to get a 3-year grant for 
Optimization and Performance Modeling work.

The group also made a list of future benchmarks that might be
considered for PARKBENCH:

I/O (MBa will investigate possible benchmarks)
C, C++
Web Servers 
Posix Threads

JD indicated that the PARKBENCH BOFS (Birds-Of-a-Feather-Session)
at Supercomputing'96 in Pittsburgh will be on Tuesday (Nov. 19)
at 1:30pm (2 hours) in the Washington Room of the Doubletree Hotel.
Current PARKBENCH results and presentation of recent NPB data by
SS will be presented before questions are taken from the audience.

The final discussion of this meeting concerned the creation of a new
electronic journal on performance evaluation and analysis which would
be published on a Web Server at Southampton and mirrored on the Netlib
server at UTK.  The group suggested a variety of names appropriate for
such a journal including:
- High-Performance Evaluation and Modeling,
- Performance Evaluation and Modeling for High-Performance Computing,
- High-Performance Computing: Evaluation and Modeling,
plus other combinations.

*** ACTION ITEM ***
JD will send out candidate names for the electronic journal
to [email-masked] for voting by PARKBENCH members.

The name decision was postponed to give all members time to propose
alternatives.  Suggestions for populating the Editorial Board of the
proposed journal includes: Joanne Martin (IBM), Phil Tannenbaum (NEC),
Ken Miura, SGI representative, and Japanese computer vendor
representatives.  ES suggested that an electronic mail address be
created for this journal for communication of such topics.

The next Parkbench Meeting is scheduled for April 1997 in Knoxville.

JD adjourned the meeting at 3:15pm EST.