The Windows HPC Team Blog : Developer

Dryad and DryadLINQ on HPC Server

JVert — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:04:00 GMT

Microsoft Research has an interesting project called Dryad which is investigating programming models for distributed data-parallel problems. If you've heard some of the hype around map/reduce programming or the Hadoop framework, you might be familiar with these type of problems. If you have gigabytes, terabytes, or even petabytes of data that you need to churn through, this is a powerful tool. On top of the Dryad framework is a programming model called DryadLinq which brings the power and familiarity of .NET's LINQ syntax to cluster computing. You can write your data analytics algorithm as a LINQ expression in your favorite .NET language and submit cluster jobs directly from Visual Studio.

I am delighted to announce that Microsoft Research has released a distribution of Dryad and DryadLINQ that runs on top of HPC Server 2008. You can download this release from here and contribute feedback and suggestions at the Microsoft Connect site here. If you want to learn more about Dryad and DryadLINQ, you can find more information on the Microsoft Research site. The source for DryadLINQ is also included in this release.

Releasing this has been a great collaboration between the HPC team and Microsoft Research. I am excited to get this work out there and see what people can do with it. So try it out and give us some feedback!

John Vert

Architect

Windows HPC Server

Update - Channel9 has a video interview with Erik Meijer and Roger Barga discussing this: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Expert-to-Expert-Erik-Roger-Barga-Introduction-to-Dryad-and-DryadLINQ/

Troubleshooting Windows HPC WCF/SOA Issues

ihimmar — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:41:00 GMT

HPC uses HPC sessions to support the service-oriented architecture (SOA) programming model based on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). Sometimes troubleshooting errors from this SOA based applications could be challenging. However this tip I'm about to share should be helpful to figure out exactly where the issue is coming from. Looking through the trace of the communication between the service hosts (running on the compute nodes) and the broker is often the key to identifying where the problem lies.

You can use the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Service Trace Viewer Tool to analyze messages logged by WCF. Service Trace Viewer is included in the Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows Vista and .NET Framework Runtime Components. You can download the Windows SDK from the Microsoft Download Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=75636. For more information about using this tool, see "Service Trace Viewer Tool (SvcTraceViewer.exe)"at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=88991.

The following are the instructions to enable tracing.

1. Modify the system.diagnostic section HpcServiceHost.exe.config in %CCP_HOME%\bin\ (*for each compute nodes*) as follow:

<system.diagnostics>

</listeners>

</source>

</sources>

<add initializeData="\\<HEADNODE>\CcpSpoolDir\host.svclog" type="System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener"

name="ServiceHostTraceListener">

</add>

<add type="System.Diagnostics.ConsoleTraceListener, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"

name="Console" traceOutputOptions="DateTime, ThreadId">

</add>

</sharedListeners>

</system.diagnostics>

Modify the modify the system.diagnostic section of the HpcWcfBroker.exe.config in %CCP_HOME%\bin (*on all broker nodes*) as follows:

<system.diagnostics>

</add>

</add>

</listeners>

</source>

</sources>

<add type="System.Diagnostics.ConsoleTraceListener, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"

name="Console" traceOutputOptions="DateTime, ThreadId">

</add>

<add initializeData="\\<HEADNODE>\CcpSpoolDir\broker.svclog"

type="System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"

name="WSLBTraceListener" traceOutputOptions="Timestamp">

</add>

</sharedListeners>

</system.diagnostics>

2. replace the <HEADNODE> in both files with your headnode name.

3. Run your application until you see the errors

4. All svclog files will be under \\<HEADNODE>\CcpSpoolDir\.

Creating Submission and Activation Filters

Barndawgie — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 03:54:00 GMT

There were a lot of questions about how to use Activation and Submission Filters to help customize queue managmeent and do things like license-aware scheduling. That, on top of some changes made in a QFE, led us to do an updated doc on using filters. You can check it out here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd277833.aspx

It contains updated sample code and explanations. Let us know if you think any information is missing!

HPCv2 Powershell and ActiveDirectory

JVert — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 20:26:00 GMT

One of the big challenges as we get close to shipping Windows HPC Server is closing the door on product changes. Now that we have a lot of internal and external customers using the product, everybody generates lots of great ideas on how to improve it. We call these DCRs (Design Change Request) and we spend a lot of time arguing over whether we should accept them (creating additional design, programming, test, documentation, and localization work) or reject them (shipping a product which might suffer from anything between small annoyances and large deployment blockers or support issues) As we get closer and closer to RTM, the bar for accepting DCRs gets higher. This is the story of one DCR we rejected.

A developer on my team filed a DCR asking for a Powershell cmdlet that returned a list of all the HPC clusters in the domain. This would be handy for a lot of different reasons. We debated this a bit and eventually rejected it because it’s not really specific to the HPC product and because you can already do this pretty easily in Powershell. Powershell doesn’t have built-in support for ActiveDirectory, but you can call out to the .NET Framework and use the DirectorySearcher class.

PS C:\> $Searcher = New-Object DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher

PS C:\> $Searcher.Filter = "(&(serviceClassName=MicrosoftComputeCluster)(keywords=Version2))"

PS C:\> $Searcher.FindAll()

Path Properties

---- ----------

LDAP://CN=MicrosoftComputeCluster,CN... {keywords, servicednsname, servicedn...

What you get back from $Searcher.FindAll() is a list of all the computer objects in the domain where the HPC job scheduler is running. Really all you care about here is the servicednsname property, so we can use ForEach-Object (abbreviated as foreach or %) to filter out the other stuff.

PS C:\> $schedlist = $Searcher.FindAll() | foreach {$_.Properties.servicednsname}

PS C:\> $schedlist

kyril.ntdev.corp.microsoft.com

37-4611A2803A.ntdev.corp.microsoft.com

JVERT.ntdev.corp.microsoft.com

GRET57001.ntdev.corp.microsoft.com

R25-1183D1023.ntdev.corp.microsoft.com

gret10.ntdev.corp.microsoft.com

liwei.ntdev.corp.microsoft.com

Now we have a list of all the HPC schedulers in the domain, we can stuff that into the Get-HpcClusterOverview cmdlet and collect their individual states:

PS C:\> $overview = $schedlist | foreach {get-hpcclusteroverview -scheduler $_}

If there are a lot of clusters in your domain that are unreachable, this might take a while because Get-HpcClusterOverview will wait for each connection to time-out. Once it does complete, $overview will have a list containing a snapshot of the statistics for each active cluster. You can pipe that through format-table or do whatever you like with it.

PS C:\> $overview | format-table

Cluster Version TotalNo ReadyNo Offline Drainin Unreach TotalCo BusyCor IdleCor

Name deCount deCount NodeCou gNodeCo ableNod reCount eCount eCount

nt unt eCount

------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------

kyrilfl 2.0.... 1 1 0 0 0 2 0 2

37-4... 2.0.... 4 4 0 0 0 32 0 32

JVERT2 2.0.... 1 1 0 0 0 2 0 2

GRET... 2.0.... 1 0 1 0 0 8 0 0

R25-... 2.0.... 3 3 0 0 0 20 0 20

gret10. 2.0.... 1 0 1 0 0 8 0 0

liwei.. 2.0.... 1 1 0 0 0 2 0 2

I think this is a great example of how to use Powershell to easily glue together two different systems (AD and HPC) in an interactive way. I hope this will give you a little taste of some of the neat things you can do with the Powershell support in HPC as well as a little taste of what the end-game of shipping a product at Microsoft involves.

John Vert

Development Manager

High Performance Computing

Building native Windows binaries from UNIX code

DennisCr — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 16:35:00 GMT

Are you looking for a convenient and familiar way to port your UNIX code to Windows for use on the CCS platform? There are a few ways to do this. I have just uploaded a document that describes one of those methods using a shell script in conjunction with SUA.

This method hinges on the fact that it is completely permissible to create native Windows binary objects with MSVC from within the SUA environment.

This document provides some background about the evolution of the script, describes the use of the script and provides pointers to all the necessary components and setup required to use this method. It is really very straightforward.

Get the document here: https://windowshpc.net/Resources/Documents/c89.doc