Voltaire Powers World's Most Powerful Supercomputer For NNSA's Los Alamos

Voltaire has announced that the company's InfiniBand-based switches are powering the world's largest supercomputer for the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The revolutionary new supercomputer, nicknamed Roadrunner, achieved sustained performance of 1,026 trillion calculations per second breaking the petaflop barrier and surpassing the performance of every other supercomputer operating today.

Roadrunner has also claimed the number-one position on the new Top500 list. This deal reflected multimillion dollar revenue for Voltaire across late 2007 and Q1 2008.

Roadrunner is a collaborative effort between Voltaire, NNSA, IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory that will primarily be used to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. It will also be used for research into astrophysics, energy, disease pathways and global climate.

"Architecting and deploying a new scale of supercomputer is a tremendous accomplishment. One of the pleasant surprises was the stability of the system as it scaled up in size," said Andy White, Roadrunner Project Director at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "The incredible amount of compute power harnessed by this machine will further the country's national security initiatives and aid in new scientific discoveries."


The supercomputer is built entirely from industry-standard hardware and based on the Linux operating system. Based on a hybrid, triblade design, each node consists of two IBM BladeCenter QS22 blades that contain four Cell processors and an LS21 blade with two AMD Opteron chips. The supercomputer uses a total of 26 Voltaire Grid Director 2012 288-port 20 Gbps InfiniBand switches for the high performance interconnect

Voltaire switches deliver 20 Gbps bandwidths and latencies of less than one microsecond to accelerate application performance by as much as 300% as compared to using Ethernet.

Moreover, the switches' power-efficient design offers lower power and cooling requirements as compared to 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet offerings. Voltaire switches employ a unique design that supports both fibre and copper cabling and the longest distances for InfiniBand.

"Voltaire is honored to partner with NNSA, Los Alamos and IBM to break new ground with the development of the world's first petaflop supercomputer," said Ronnie Kenneth, CEO and chairman, Voltaire.

"By selecting Voltaire InfiniBand-based switches as the interconnect, Los Alamos will be able to capitalize on the supercomputer's intensity to run complex calculations and simulations faster and more efficiently."

Source : http://www.spacedaily.com/

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NASA Supercomputer Ranks Among World's Fastest

NASA's newest supercomputer at Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., has garnered the number three spot on the Top500 list of the world's most powerful computers. The announcement was made Nov. 17, 2008 at the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC08) in Austin, Texas.

The Pleiades supercomputer is an SGI Altix ICE system with 12,800 Intel Xeon quad-core processors (51,200 cores, 100 racks) running at 487 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops) on the LINPACK benchmark, the industry standard for measuring a system's floating point computing power.

One of the most powerful general-purpose supercomputers ever built, Pleiades also features the world's largest InfiniBand interconnect network.

The LINPACK run also measured electrical power consumption-an increasingly important consideration in high-end computing. Using a total of 2.09 megawatts, or 233 megaflops per watt, Pleiades is among the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world.

"Pleiades represents a significant engineering achievement in several ways," said William Thigpen, Pleiades project manager at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames.


In addition to its power and InfiniBand record, "Pleiades can run NASA codes with minimal modifications, and is compatible with standard desktop engineering workstations so our users can migrate codes easily from their desktops. Users from all key mission areas will have an enormous resource to meet their critical milestones," Thigpen added.

Among the scientific and engineering projects accepted for computer time on Pleiades:

- Extensive simulations of large computational problems for future space vehicle design;

- Development of increasingly detailed models of large-scale dark matter halos and galaxy evolution;

- Running coupled atmosphere-ocean models to assess decadal climate prediction skill for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"Over a record-making few weeks, NASA has again deployed one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world," said Eng Lim Goh, chief technology officer at SGI.

"In the race to achieve superior computational power, NASA's knowledge of rapid yet productive deployment is a rare advantage. We are proud to be part of NASA's ongoing journey to show the world what is possible."

"We look forward to seeing the science breakthroughs enabled by Pleiades," said Stephen Wheat, senior director for high performance computing at Intel Corp. "It's rewarding to see that the performance features of the Intel Xeon quad-core processors meet the growing computational challenges of the nation's space program."

The InfiniBand fabric interconnecting Pleiades' 6,400 nodes requires more than 20 miles of double data rate cabling. InfiniBand is also used as the primary local-area network backbone that interconnects computing, storage, and visualization systems, and to facilitate cross-system data file access.

This enables scientific visualization and data analysis to execute concurrently as computer jobs run, producing ultra-high-fidelity results for the enormous datasets used in NASA mission projects.

Pleiades was acquired to augment the space agency's Columbia supercomputer (ranked No. 2 on the Top500 list in November 2004) in supporting NASA's four key mission areas: aeronautics research, exploration systems, science, and space operations.

source : http://www.spacedaily.com/

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NASA, Intel And SGI Team Up To Soup Up The Supercomputer

NASA, Intel Corp., and SGI today announced the signing of an agreement establishing intentions to collaborate on significantly increasing the space agency's supercomputer performance and capacity.

Under the terms of a Space Act Agreement, NASA will work closely with Intel and SGI to increase computational capabilities for modeling and simulation at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

"Achieving such a monumental increase in performance will help fulfill NASA's increasing need for additional computing capacity and will enable us to provide the computational performance and capacity needed for future missions," said Ames Director S. Pete Worden. "This additional computational performance is necessary to help us achieve breakthrough scientific discoveries."

NASA Ames, Intel and SGI will work together on a project called Pleiades to develop a computational system with a capacity of one Petaflops peak performance (1,000 trillion operations per second) by 2009 and a system with a peak performance of 10 Petaflops (10,000 trillion operations per second) by 2012.


"Throughout its history, NASA has sought to explore the most compelling questions about mankind, Earth, and the worlds that await our discovery," said Robert "Bo" Ewald, chief executive officer of SGI.

"SGI is proud to be part of this effort. These groundbreaking new systems powered by SGI and fueled by the latest multi-core Intel processors, offer a platform for new discoveries that will help us all achieve the most promising future for the human race. This effort is important to everyone on this planet."

This collaboration builds on the 2004 deployment of Columbia, which generated a tenfold increase in supercomputing capacity for the agency. Meeting NASA's future mission challenges will require additional computational resources to handle increasingly higher fidelity modeling and simulation. In 2009, NASA expects to increase that computing capability 16 times with the Pleiades project, and by an additional tenfold in 2012.

"Intel, working with SGI, is proud to play an important role in helping NASA expand the pursuit of scientific discovery," said Diane M. Bryant, vice president of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group and general manager or Server Platforms Group, Intel Digital Enterprise Group.

"Systems such as Pleiades challenge the imagination, and guide our exploration of Earth, space, and beyond. As we approach performance that was once thought impossible to achieve, our eyes are opened even wider to the vast possibilities enabled by supercomputing."

Source : http://www.spacedaily.com/

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Jaguar Upgrade Brings ORNL Closer To Petascale Computing

Upgrades to Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer have more than doubled its performance, increasing the system's ability to deliver far-reaching advances in climate studies, energy research, and a wide range of sciences.

The system recently completed acceptance testing, running applications in climate science, quantum chemistry, combustion science, materials science, nanoscience, fusion science, and astrophysics, as well as benchmarking applications that test supercomputing performance.

The Jaguar system, a Cray XT4 located at ORNL's National Center for Computational Sciences, now uses more than 31,000 processing cores to deliver up to 263 trillion calculations a second (or 263 teraflops).

"The Department of Energy's Leadership Computing Facility is putting unprecedented computing power in the hands of leading scientists to enable the next breakthroughs in science and technology," said ORNL Director Thom Mason. "This upgrade is an essential step along that path, bringing us ever closer to the era of petascale computing [systems capable of thousands of trillions of calculations per second]."

Jaguar was among the most powerful computing systems within DOE's Office of Science even before the recent upgrade and has delivered extraordinary results across a broad range of computational sciences.

"The leadership capability at Oak Ridge has been delivering real scientific results," said Michael Strayer, associate director for advanced scientific computing research in the DOE Office of Science.

"Benoit Roux of the University of Chicago used Jaguar to simulate in unprecedented detail the voltage-gated potassium channel, a membrane protein that responds to spikes of electricity by changing shape to allow potassium ions to enter a cell. This work has the potential to help us understand and control certain forms of cardiovascular and neurological disease."

Climate scientists are calculating the potential consequences of greenhouse gas emissions and the potential benefits of limiting these emissions. Combustion scientists are modeling the most efficient designs for engines that use fossil fuels and biofuels.

Fusion researchers are using the system to lead the way toward a clean and plentiful source of electricity. Physicists are exploring the secrets of the universe, illuminating its most elusive mysteries. And materials scientists are searching for the next revolution in technology.

"This is an important advancement," said Thomas Zacharia, ORNL associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences.

"Leading researchers need many orders of magnitude more computing power and infrastructure than we can yet provide, and they have shown us how they will use these new resources, whether it be to predict the consequences of climate change at the regional level, design new materials with predetermined properties, discover new chemical catalysts, explore more efficient ways to manufacture biofuels, or simulate all important aspects of new reactor designs."

"The U.S. Department of Energy and its Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been making huge strides in providing more and more simulation capabilities to advance some of the world's most important scientific and engineering research-and invaluable partners with Cray to push the leading edge of supercomputing," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray.

"This upgrade is another big milestone in leadership computing and we, along with many others around the world, are looking forward to learning about the scientific breakthroughs that are borne as a result of this powerful new computing capability."

With its new power, Jaguar will be able to double its contribution to DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program, which is revolutionizing key areas of science by facilitating the world's most challenging computer simulations.

The NCCS will host 30 INCITE projects in 2008 from universities, private industry, and government research laboratories, contributing more than 140 million processor hours on Jaguar.

source : http://www.spacedaily.com/

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