SC Conference - Activity Details

Ian Foster  (University of Chicago)

Ioan Raicu  (University of Chicago)

Yong Zhao  (Microsoft Corporation)

Monday,  08:30AM - 12:00PM

Room 11A/11B

The MTAGS workshop will focus on the ability to manage and execute large-scale applications on today's largest clusters (60K+ processors), Grids (100K+), and Supercomputers (200K+). We define a new class of applications that we call Many-Task Computing (MTC), which denote high-performance computations comprising multiple distinct activities, coupled via file system operations or message passing. Tasks may be small or large, uniprocessor or multiprocessor, compute-intensive or data-intensive. The set of tasks may be static or dynamic, homogeneous or heterogeneous, loosely or tightly coupled. The aggregate number of tasks, quantity of computing, and volumes of data are extremely large. Today's HPC systems are a viable platform to host MTC applications. However, challenges arise in the efficient and scalable execution of MTC on HPC systems; these challenges vary from local resource manager scalability and granularity, efficient utilization of the raw hardware, shared file system contention and scalability, reliability at scale, and application scalability.