A Super-Programming Approach for Mining Association Rules in Parallel on PC Clusters
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
This is an exciting time in high performance computing (HPC). Radical change has become the norm as clusters of commercial off the shelf (COTS) computers have come to dominate HPC. The hardware trends are clear. Microprocessor technology has continued to follow Moore's law. These high performance processors on two to four processor SMP boards make ideal nodes for building supercomputer-class clusters. On the networking front, commercially available networks are delivering impressive performance numbers. With Infiniband products expected in the next year or two, we'll have a quantum leap in network performance with a significant drop in price. In short, the hardware for HPC is in good shape and its steadily getting better. What about the software?The software for HPC is in poor shape. Its great for organizations that can accept the "people-time" required to keep clusters up and running. But for the commercial side of technical computing, the software solutions available today just aren't up to the task.We believe that the best way to solve our HPC software problems is to work together. Intel has worked to create cross-industry groups dedicated to solving HPC software problems. On the shared memory front, we are active in the OpenMP Architecture Review Board. Working with this group, we have helped standardize API's for shared memory programming.For clusters, we have helped found the Open Cluster Group. The OpenClusterGroup is an informal consortium of commercial and research organizations interested in cluster-computing. Our mission is to make clusters a realistic option for organizations that use high performance computing to accomplish their goals.The first project from the Open Cluster Group is OSCAR: a fully integrated easy to install bundle of software designed to make it easy to build and use a cluster for high performance computing. Everything you need to build, maintain, and use a modest sized Linux cluster is included in OSCAR. In this brief note, we introduce OSCAR and provide the background information you need to use it.