[Swift-devel] Try coaster on BG/P ?

[Michael Wilde]

Zhao, Ioan and I have been working with several scientists on running 5 
applications on the BG/P over the past month. We've been using the 
approach of getting them running under a simple shell script, then 
running at large scale under Falkon, and hoping to move them all to 
Swift and then to this small group of nearby friendly users as the final 
stage.

It would be good to see if Swift Coaster can run on the BG/P now, so we 
can try these apps under it.

A change in the past month is that we've exploited the technique of 
running the Falkon (java) server on the BG/P IO nodes. The BG/P UNIX 
system (ZeptoOS) developers created a generalized startup script under 
which a user can launch any needed ION services before the user's jobs 
are started on the compute nodes. This has given very good scaling up to 
64K CPU cores.

This also may get around the NAT problems that were discussed on this 
list, and may enable Coaster to work on the BGPs with less change.

I *think* that both the login nodes and the compute nodes can reach the 
ION (and vice versa) on direct networks without NAT, hopefully allowing 
Coaster UDP communication to work.

Coaster is not  a high priority for this, but in the next few weeks I 
hope to start running the apps above under Swift.  If Coaster is ready 
to try on the BGP at that point, I'm eager to test it there. Before that 
I hope to test it first in an environment where it already works.

Ben or Mihael, can you point me to (or write) a README on how to run 
Coaster?