5 ms·

HPC at Autodesk

34 points by savin-goyal 3y ago

JamesCoyne 3y ago
Can anyone speak to the general appetite at Autodesk for open-source projects?
- mrcwinn 3y ago
  [Former employee of several years.] Generally speaking, I would say if Autodesk believes open source can advance a business goal, it will support that open source project. But I never got a sense of Autodesk sort of culturally or in a deeply embedded way caring about open source. High marks for how they treat employees and as a place to work, but not an OS leader.
  - JamesCoyne 3y ago
    [Current Autodesk CAD user] Thanks! Nice to hear their employees are well treated; atleast some good is coming from the yearly subscriptions.
    - inferiorhuman 3y ago
      Autodesk as an employer has fallen quite a bit from even a decade ago. Despite the culture of crabs in a bucket playing at empire building Bass' tenure was marked by generally employee friendly policies and a sincere passion behind some of their projects. The same definitely can't be said for the marketing dweebs that took over (and judging by Fusion they've ramped up their anti-customer initiatives too). The shift towards subscription based bullshit was essentially the start of the effort to oust Bass.
  - vxNsr 3y ago
    Off topic but: currently needing to use autocad for a work project, any recommendations for learning autolisp or w/e the scripting language is? I was having trouble finding a good resource for this, seems like everyone just knows it and the only way to learn is to have good enough Google-fu to find the forum post that fulfills your criteria. And hope it’s not out of date.
  - inferiorhuman 3y ago
    Right. See also Ochopod and OpenStack. Open source is the means to a promotion, nothing more, nothing less.
- monuszero 3y ago
  [current employee of Autodesk] Minor contributions to existing OSS are generally encouraged day-to-day by employees. There are also more strategic open source initiatives such as the USD stuff covered here. Many of us, especially in the research division, would love to put more code out there. (For example some tools that we use internally) The good news on this front is that there is now a sanctioned process for this to happen, and the attitude seems much warmer than when I joined a decade ago. I’m personally involved in trying to open source some of my own work in the robotics domain, and have been pleasantly surprised with the response.
riedel 3y ago
I do not quite get this. How does this enable someone to run ray or metaflow on a typical batch scheduled HPC system (slurm or alike)? Inter node communication is done via the lustre file system, right?
- linksnapzz 3y ago
  I think it said that data access is via Lustre, and communication is by Nvidia MLNX NCCL, which seems to be some kind of nvidia gpu-specific MPI type library; it would seem to be doing RDMA from GPU to GPU via fabric interconnects, so far as I can tell...
- vtuulos 3y ago
  Metaflow integrates with AWS Batch which many folks use for serious HPC. Internode scheduling happens through the multinode scheduling supported by AWS Batch. networking via EFA etc. We'll blog more about this soon but you can certainly give it a try today! https://github.com/outerbounds/metaflow-ray https://github.com/outerbounds/metaflow-ray
mgaunard 3y ago
In my experience ray in AWS is a good way to badly utilize resources and waste a lot of money (as is generally anything cloud or anything python; when you do both it multiplies). I'd rather have a real HPC cluster.
- davnn 3y ago
  Python as a glue language (as it‘s mostly used in data intensive applications) for something like MPI should not add too much overhead?
- dekhn 3y ago
  You can build a SLURM cluster out of UltraCluster nodes in AWS. Money comparisons can be misleading because many people ignore ancillary expenses in running an HPC facility.
  - mgaunard 3y ago
    Virtual machines perform extremely poorly, so you must take metal instances. These will cost you the same as buying the hardware outright after 3 months of usage. And you're still stuck on a non-deterministic high-latency network you can't get rid of, and with very limited hardware configurations. It's more like a grid than a HPC cluster. There are only two possible advantages: - you want a lot of hardware very quickly rather than wait for it to be delivered. - you don't have the desire/capability to be/hire a network engineer.
    - dekhn 3y ago
      When you say "virtual machines perform extremely poorly", on what do you base that? (note: I've worked in supercomputing and HPC for over two decades" The network I was talking about is called UltraCluster which have an extremely high bandwidth and low latency, designed to get great scaling on MPI jobs (as well as ML). Typical instances used with UC are p5, which have 8 H100 nvidia GPUs, 192 vCPUs, 2TB RAM, 3.2Tbps bandwidth PER MACHINE, 900GB/sec between GPU peers, and 8 3.84TB SSDs. They are not marketed as metal instances. No, it's not like a grid. Your thinking is dated and not representative of how people do HPC on AWS, Azure, or Google.
kristianp 3y ago
Actual title: Autodesk and Outerbounds Partner to Open Source Ray and HPC Integration in Metaflow

HPC at Autodesk

34 points by savin-goyal 3y ago

JamesCoyne 3y ago

Can anyone speak to the general appetite at Autodesk for open-source projects?

mrcwinn 3y ago
[Former employee of several years.] Generally speaking, I would say if Autodesk believes open source can advance a business goal, it will support that open source project. But I never got a sense of Autodesk sort of culturally or in a deeply embedded way caring about open source. High marks for how they treat employees and as a place to work, but not an OS leader.
- JamesCoyne 3y ago
  [Current Autodesk CAD user] Thanks! Nice to hear their employees are well treated; atleast some good is coming from the yearly subscriptions.
  - inferiorhuman 3y ago
    Autodesk as an employer has fallen quite a bit from even a decade ago. Despite the culture of crabs in a bucket playing at empire building Bass' tenure was marked by generally employee friendly policies and a sincere passion behind some of their projects. The same definitely can't be said for the marketing dweebs that took over (and judging by Fusion they've ramped up their anti-customer initiatives too). The shift towards subscription based bullshit was essentially the start of the effort to oust Bass.
- vxNsr 3y ago
  Off topic but: currently needing to use autocad for a work project, any recommendations for learning autolisp or w/e the scripting language is? I was having trouble finding a good resource for this, seems like everyone just knows it and the only way to learn is to have good enough Google-fu to find the forum post that fulfills your criteria. And hope it’s not out of date.
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  Right. See also Ochopod and OpenStack. Open source is the means to a promotion, nothing more, nothing less.
monuszero 3y ago
[current employee of Autodesk] Minor contributions to existing OSS are generally encouraged day-to-day by employees. There are also more strategic open source initiatives such as the USD stuff covered here. Many of us, especially in the research division, would love to put more code out there. (For example some tools that we use internally) The good news on this front is that there is now a sanctioned process for this to happen, and the attitude seems much warmer than when I joined a decade ago. I’m personally involved in trying to open source some of my own work in the robotics domain, and have been pleasantly surprised with the response.

riedel 3y ago

I do not quite get this. How does this enable someone to run ray or metaflow on a typical batch scheduled HPC system (slurm or alike)? Inter node communication is done via the lustre file system, right?

linksnapzz 3y ago
I think it said that data access is via Lustre, and communication is by Nvidia MLNX NCCL, which seems to be some kind of nvidia gpu-specific MPI type library; it would seem to be doing RDMA from GPU to GPU via fabric interconnects, so far as I can tell...
vtuulos 3y ago
Metaflow integrates with AWS Batch which many folks use for serious HPC. Internode scheduling happens through the multinode scheduling supported by AWS Batch. networking via EFA etc. We'll blog more about this soon but you can certainly give it a try today! https://github.com/outerbounds/metaflow-ray https://github.com/outerbounds/metaflow-ray

mgaunard 3y ago

In my experience ray in AWS is a good way to badly utilize resources and waste a lot of money (as is generally anything cloud or anything python; when you do both it multiplies). I'd rather have a real HPC cluster.

davnn 3y ago
Python as a glue language (as it‘s mostly used in data intensive applications) for something like MPI should not add too much overhead?
dekhn 3y ago
You can build a SLURM cluster out of UltraCluster nodes in AWS. Money comparisons can be misleading because many people ignore ancillary expenses in running an HPC facility.
- mgaunard 3y ago
  Virtual machines perform extremely poorly, so you must take metal instances. These will cost you the same as buying the hardware outright after 3 months of usage. And you're still stuck on a non-deterministic high-latency network you can't get rid of, and with very limited hardware configurations. It's more like a grid than a HPC cluster. There are only two possible advantages: - you want a lot of hardware very quickly rather than wait for it to be delivered. - you don't have the desire/capability to be/hire a network engineer.
  - dekhn 3y ago
    When you say "virtual machines perform extremely poorly", on what do you base that? (note: I've worked in supercomputing and HPC for over two decades" The network I was talking about is called UltraCluster which have an extremely high bandwidth and low latency, designed to get great scaling on MPI jobs (as well as ML). Typical instances used with UC are p5, which have 8 H100 nvidia GPUs, 192 vCPUs, 2TB RAM, 3.2Tbps bandwidth PER MACHINE, 900GB/sec between GPU peers, and 8 3.84TB SSDs. They are not marketed as metal instances. No, it's not like a grid. Your thinking is dated and not representative of how people do HPC on AWS, Azure, or Google.

kristianp 3y ago

Actual title: Autodesk and Outerbounds Partner to Open Source Ray and HPC Integration in Metaflow