Re: CycleCloud BigScience Challenge giving away ~8-hours on 30000 core cluster for research

From: David Foster Date: November 10, 2011 technical Source: mail-archive.com
I agree with Julia, Thanks for this Bill, but quantitative benchmarking would be very much appreciated. Regards, David
Quoted reply history
On 10/11/11 9:55 AM, "Ivashina, Julia" <[email protected]> wrote: Bill, This is nice to hear about the speed improvements for NONMEM you received. Could you please describe gains in performance in a qualitative manner with model examples you used. I think everyone will benefit from such NONMEM 7.2 benchmarking. I posted a similar question in March but not many responded. Thanks, Julia -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bill Knebel Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2011 5:03 PM To: [email protected] Cc: Jason Stowe; Nick Holford; William Bachman Subject: Re: [NMusers] CycleCloud BigScience Challenge giving away ~8-hours on 30000 core cluster for research Since there seems to be some questions around cloud-based NONMEM, we wanted to share our experience of utilizing parallel NONMEM in a cloud-based environment. We use the enterprise-licensed version of NONMEM(R) 7.2. to perform modeling and simulation, both serial and parallelized, on an AWS cloud infrastructure. Briefly, we used a combination of recent MPICH2 libraries, the Sun Grid Engine integrated ORTE parallel environment, and StarCluster to deploy parallel NONMEM(R) on linux AWS EC2 instances of up to 100 cores for estimation (which appears to be the current NONMEM(R) 7.2 limit for parallel computing), and a virtually unlimited number of cores for simulation or use of other open-source modeling tools (R, OpenBUGS). The gains in performance are very real, and probably the best we've experienced on any multi-user distributed computing infrastructure. Bill ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Bill Knebel, PharmD, PhD Principal Scientist II Metrum Research Group LLC 2 Tunxis Road, Suite 112 Tariffville, CT 06081 O: 860.735.7043 C: 860.930.1370 F: 860.760.6014 On Nov 4, 2011, at 3:06 PM, Bachman, William wrote: > Cloud computing on a system like this requires an unlimited enterprise > license for NONMEM. Pricing is available from [email protected]. > > > William J. Bachman, Ph.D. > Director, Pharmacometrics R&D > Icon Development Solutions > 6031 University Blvd., Suite 300 > Ellicott City, MD 21043 > Office 215-616-8699 > [email protected] > > > > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On > Behalf Of Jason Stowe > Sent: Friday, November 04, 2011 2:12 PM > To: Nick Holford > Cc: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [NMusers] CycleCloud BigScience Challenge giving away ~8-hours > on 30000 core cluster for research > > Hi Nick, > On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 8:59 AM, Nick Holford <[email protected]> wrote: > Jason, > > If I was a winner of your competition how would I go about using NONMEM? > How do you manage NONMEM licensing on you cloud cluster? > What NONMEM license fee would one have to pay for 30000 cores? > > Nick > Hi Nick, > Unfortunately, I can't speak to an individuals user's NONMEM license. We do > have commercial clients running NONMEM on CycleCloud clusters at varying > scales. A winner with appropriate licensing doesn't need to run 8 hours on > 30k cores, you could also run for 24 hours on 10000 cores, etc. If your > license relates to compilation vs. execution, or if you have a site-wide > license, we can't say, so you'll need to look at your license to deal with > that. > > Perhaps someone from Icon could talk about this kind of non-profit licensing? > > Thanks, > Jason > > > > On 2/11/2011 2:19 p.m., Jason Stowe wrote: > Hi all, > > Long time reader, first time poster. > > Cycle recently announced that we're giving away the equivalent of 8-hrs on a > 30000 core CycleCloud HPC cluster for a grand prize winner in the CycleCloud > BigScience Challenge. Up to five finalists will win 4 hours on 3000 core > clusters as well. The Compute time is to benefit academic and non-profit > researchers that are doing science which could benefit humanity. > > Some current applicants are in life sciences and CycleCloud currently > supports reliable/large-scale clusters running NONMEM for Top 5 Pharma, so I > wanted to welcome more researchers in the NONMEM community to enter. > > We describe the challenge and why we're excited about it here: > http://bit.ly/BigScience > > The application process is simply answering 4 questions (takes less than half > an hour): State who you are, what is your research, why it is important, and > how you currently run computation. The applicatiopn is available here: > http://cyclecomputing.com/big-science-challenge/overview > > So far, response has been great, and Inside HPC covered descriptions of some > of the recent applications we've received: > http://insidehpc.com/2011/10/27/24209/ > http://blog.cyclecomputing.com/ > > Submissions are due by November 7th, so submit early and we hope to help some > of you get some BigScience done quickly. > > Best, > Jason > > -- > > > ================================== > Jason A. Stowe > cell: 607.227.9686 > main: 888.292.5320 > > http://twitter.com/jasonastowe/ > http://twitter.com/cyclecomputing/ > > Cycle Computing, LLC > Leader in Open Compute Solutions for Clouds, Servers, and Desktops > Enterprise Condor Support and Management Tools > > http://www.cyclecomputing.com > http://www.cyclecloud.com > > > -- > Nick Holford, Professor Clinical Pharmacology > Dept Pharmacology& Clinical Pharmacology > University of Auckland,85 Park Rd,Private Bag 92019,Auckland,New Zealand > tel:+64(9)923-6730 fax:+64(9)373-7090 mobile:+64(21)46 23 53 > email: [email protected] > http://www.fmhs.auckland.ac.nz/sms/pharmacology/holford > > > > > -- > > > ================================== > Jason A. Stowe > cell: 607.227.9686 > main: 888.292.5320 > > http://twitter.com/jasonastowe/ > http://twitter.com/cyclecomputing/ > > Cycle Computing, LLC > Leader in Open Compute Solutions for Clouds, Servers, and Desktops > Enterprise Condor Support and Management Tools > > http://www.cyclecomputing.com > http://www.cyclecloud.com > >