Thu 01 Oct 2009 10:48:34 AM PST · by Ernest_at_the_Beach · 13 replies · 273+ views
HPCwire ^ | September 29, 2009 | Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor
Interesting article ...
Petascale Computing on Jaguar
The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), sponsored by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science, manages the 1.64-petaflop Jaguar supercomputer for use by scientists and engineers solving problems of national and global importance. The new petaflops machine will make it possible to address some of the most challenging scientific problems in areas such as climate modeling, renewable energy, materials science, fusion and combustion. Annually, 80 percent of Jaguar’s resources are allocated through DOE’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, a competitively selected, peer reviewed process open to researchers from universities, industry, government and non-profit organizations.
Through a close, four-year partnership between ORNL and Cray, Jaguar has delivered state-of-the-art computing capability to scientists and engineers from academia, national laboratories and industry. The XT system has grown in strength through a series of advances since being installed as a 25-teraflop XT3 in 2005. By early 2008 Jaguar was a 263-teraflop Cray XT4 able to solve some of the most challenging problems that could not be solved otherwise. In 2008 Jaguar was expanded with the addition of a 1.4-petaflop Cray XT5. The resulting system has over 181,000 processing cores connected internally with Cray’s Seastar2+ network. The XT4 and XT5 parts of Jaguar are combined into a single system using an InfiniBand network that links each piece to the Spider file system.
Throughout its series of upgrades, Jaguar has maintained a consistent programming model for the users. This programming model allows users to continue to evolve their existing codes rather than write new ones. Applications that ran on previous versions of Jaguar can be recompiled, tuned for efficiency, and then run on the new machine.
Jaguar is the most powerful computer system for science with world leading performance, more than three times the memory of any other computer, and world leading bandwidth to disks and networks. The AMD Opteron processor is a powerful, general purpose processor that uses the X86 instruction set which has a rich set of applications, compilers, and tools. Jaguar has hundreds of applications that have been ported and run on the Cray XT system, many of which have been scaled up to run on 25,000 to 150,000 cores. Jaguar is ready to take on the most challenging problems for the world.
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Just imagining the next generation of this type of system that could be around as soon as next year. Think of a quad eight-core Xeon with four 32-core Larrabee PCIe cards (each Xeon running one card). That’s about 8.5 TFLOPs in a 3U using off-the-shelf parts, nothing customized. You could hit a petaFLOP in nine racks.
Yes, I know technically some video cards can easily beat this, but the range of problems they can be programmed to solve is much more limited (I learned that from Folding@Home).
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