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HenryTo
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 Posted: Sun Apr 15, 2007 6:42 pm Post subject: Supercomputing |
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Cray's supercomputer at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) upgraded (doubled) its performance to 119 teraflops - putting it number 2 on the world's Top 500 list of supercomputers:
http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/1370386.html |
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HenryTo
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2009 9:28 pm Post subject: |
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A clearer view of the supercomputing roadmap over the next few years, as IBM commits to deploying its next-generation BlueGene systems, "Sequoia" by 2012:
http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=17&issue=20090202
| Quote: | A prototype supercomputer called Dawn is set for delivery in the next few months at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Dawn, capable of 500 teraflops, or a trillion calculations per second, will help lay the foundation to build Sequoia's applications.
Sequoia, set to go online in 2011, will run at 20 petaflops, or a quadrillion floating operations per second. That's 15 times faster than today's fastest computers — more powerful than the world's top 500 supercomputers combined.
Twenty petaflops equals 20,000 trillion calculations per second; one petaflop equals 150,000 calculations per second for every person on earth.
Sequoia will calculate in a single day what would take 120 billion people armed with calculators nearly 50 years.
In practical terms, Sequoia will let forecasters predict local weather events that affect areas 100 meters to one kilometer away, down from their current 10-kilometer range. Local forecasters might be able to accurately map the path of notoriously unpredictable tornadoes.
Future government uses could include study of the human genome, climate change and new sources of energy.
Companies will be able to buy time on the full Sequoia system according to their computing needs.
The system should benefit many businesses that deal with massive amounts of data but don't want to buy and manage their own supercomputer, says Srini Chari, a tech industry analyst and consultant with Cabot Partners Group.
That might include auto and aerospace firms, oil and gas exploration companies, and drug developers.
The new supercomputer will pack a much bigger punch into a smaller space than current versions of BlueGene, using far less space and energy , Chari says.
"The problem until now has been the enormous physical space needed to house supercomputers," Chari said. "That has resulted in an enormous cost for power and cooling, which Sequoia will address."
Sequoia will run on 1.6 million processors housed in 96 racks, each the size of a refrigerator. The entire system will take up just 3,422 square feet, much less space than older supercomputers.
Just one Sequoia rack, filling just 30 square feet, could equal the speed of the five or 10 fastest supercomputers in the world today, says Dave Turek, head of IBM's supercomputing unit.
"This advance makes really powerful computing eligible to fall into the hands of many industrial companies, as well as academic and government users who are the traditional early adopters of supercomputers," Turek said. "The energy consumption component of Sequoia is extraordinarily innovative."
Sequoia will complete 3,000 calculations per watt of energy used, compared with just 200 calculations per watt today, Turek says. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2009 3:19 am Post subject: |
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More on the Nvidia Tesla desktop. The thing to watch out for is (the GPU's) compatibility with today's software, such as Mathematica and Matlab. To that end, both Nvidia and Microsoft are working to solve these problems - literally bringing supercomputing capability to the masses:
http://www.designnews.com/article/162620-Supercomputing_Hits_the_Desktop.php
| Quote: | Snell says one of the longstanding obstacles for a hybrid approach is the issue of programmability since software has to be rewritten to take advantage of the new parallel architecture. "At some level, software needs to contain instructions that tell the system to execute a given calculation on a GPU rather than a CPU," he says. "The approach can be made more straightforward, but it doesn't eliminate the step that software has to be rewritten."
NVIDIA tackles that problem with CUDA, its C++-like programming environment used to tune applications to the GPU's parallel computing architecture. CUDA has been widely embraced among leading software vendors, including Mathematica and National Instruments, giving NVIDIA's GPU hybrid a jump on competing accelerator models, Snell says. However, CUDA has limitations in that it ties developers to the NVIDIA platform, according to Microsoft's Ryan Waite, product unit manager for Windows HPC Server. What the market requires, Waite says, is a general-purpose language for GPU programming that works across several platforms. To that end, he says Microsoft is planning a set of extensions to its Direct X language to enable developers to tap into the parallel processing engines in GPUs.
In addition to Microsoft's efforts, The Khronos Group has formed an industry working group to create royalty-free, open standards for programming parallel computing across GPUs and CPUs. The so-called Compute Working Group includes participation from such leaders as IBM, Apple, ARM, AMD, NVIDIA, Freescale and others. Apple has proposed the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) specification as a basis for the standard and the group is soliciting companies to provide input.
There are other software-related advances helping to propel HPC's march onto the desktop, according to Microsoft. Windows HPC Server, particularly the latest 2008 version, has done its part to help make these very complex systems easier to use and manage, especially for engineers and scientists who aren't necessarily versed in computer administration tasks, according to Waite. "If you're an engineer or scientist using Mathlab, you want to stay in that application," he says. "A personal supercomputer supports this idea instead of having centralized resources that only a limited number of people have access to and which require a lot of care and feeding."
John Stone, a senior research programmer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has long been a user of HPC clusters, but admits a personal supercomputer brings a level of convenience not seen with traditional systems. Stone, part of the university's Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group, taps HPC technology to create a mathematical model that simulates the behavior of biological molecules at an atomic level - something that's not visible even through highly sophisticated microscopes. A couple years ago, running these highly complex calculations meant tapping some far-off supercomputer for days. Last year, Stone's group began working with CUDA and a custom-built hybrid CPU/GPU system and was able to perform the same work on a single GPU machine in their own lab in only 27 minutes. Stone says early tests show the new Tesla hybrid platform drastically improves even that level of performance.
"Being able to do this work locally without having to transfer files to a remote machine managed by someone else eliminates hassles and is a big time saver," he says. "The same reason why you'd want a personal computer in the first place now applies to a problem that previously required a small cluster or supercomputer." |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Sun Dec 28, 2008 12:14 pm Post subject: |
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Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveils "Kracken" - a new supercomputer that would run alongside "Jaguar," the second fastest supercomputer in the world capable of a peak capability of 1.6 petaflops:
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2008/12/26/3878860.htm
| Quote: | The new system -- nicknamed Kraken, after a mythical sea monster -- should be ready for research in early 2009, according to lab officials.
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In its initial phase, Kraken will have a peak capability of more than 600 teraflops (600 trillion calculations per second). It will be upgraded about a year from now to achieve a peak of about 1 petaflops (or 1,000 trillion calculations per second).
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In an interview earlier this year, Zacharia talked about plans for having two petascale computers available at the lab. Jaguar should be the world's best computer for open scientific users, and Kraken should be the top machine dedicated to academic users, he said.
The two Cray supercomputers could be hooked together and operated as one if there are special projects that require their combined computing power, Zacharia said. |
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HenryTo
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HenryTo
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HenryTo
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Sun Nov 23, 2008 1:25 pm Post subject: |
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The real innovation in the supercomputing field that everyone should be talking about:
http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9120741
| Quote: | Nvidia today unveiled a workstation it calls the Tesla Personal Supercomputer at the Supercomputing 08 show here. The Tesla sports 960 cores, delivers almost 4 teraflops of performance and costs less than $9,995. It achieves that speed and price by using four graphics processing units (GPU), each of which has 240 cores.
"This really is the supercomputer on your desk," Dell Inc. CEO Michael Dell told attendees at the conference, which drew more than 10,000 science and commercial high-performance computing users, along with a slew of vendors hoping that the high-performance computing (HPC) market will be a bright spot in otherwise difficult tech economy. The attendance was a new record for this annual conference.
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Dell has produced a workstation in its Precision line that uses the Nvidia GPU chip, and a number of other vendors are producing systems based on Nvidia's parallel computing architecture.
This is type of system is designed to support applications that require a high degree of parallelization, such as visualizations, seismic studies, biomedical research and product design, among others. Nvidia released a software development kit about a year ago so independent software developers could build applications to run on the new system. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2008 12:21 am Post subject: |
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Latest "Top 500 list" just released:
http://www.top500.org/lists/2008/11/press-release
Some highlights:
| Quote: | The entry level to the list moved up to the 12.64 Tflop/s mark on the Linpack benchmark, compared to 9.0 Tflop/s six months ago.
The last system on the current list would have been listed at position 267 in the previous TOP500 just six months ago.
Total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 16.95 Pflop/s, compared to 11.7 Pflop/s six months ago and 6.97 Pflop/s one year ago.
The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 291 of the 500 systems (up from 257). The European share (151 systems – down from 184) is settling down after having risen for some time, but is still substantially larger then the Asian share (unchanged at 47 systems).
Dominant countries in Asia are Japan with 18 systems (down from 22), China with 16 systems (up from 12), India with 8 systems (up from 6).
In Europe, UK remains the No. 1 with 45 systems (53 six months ago). Germany fell steeply but is still in the No. 2 spot with 24 systems (46 six months ago). |
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HenryTo
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Tue Nov 11, 2008 4:28 am Post subject: |
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We now have a new number one on our hands - in the form of Cray XT "Jaguar" supercomputer at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/supercomputers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212001621
| Quote: | The beefed-up Jaguar has a peak performance of 1.64 petaflops, compared with the Roadrunner's 1.026 petaflops. The Roadrunner is used for nuclear security and scientific research at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
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The upgraded Jaguar already has been used by scientists to complete a superconductivity calculation that required a sustained performance of more than 1.3 petaflops. Superconductivity is a phenomenon characterized by exactly zero electrical resistance. The phenomenon occurs in certain materials generally at very low temperatures.
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"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," said Michael Strayer, associate director of the DOE Office of Science for Advanced Scientific Computing Research.
The faster Jaguar is expected to be a boon for U.S. industry by making it possible to perform "virtual prototyping" of complex systems and products. Such prototyping reduces development costs and shortens the time required to market new technologies, the DOE said. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Mon Oct 20, 2008 7:40 pm Post subject: |
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6th fastest supercomputer in the most unlikely of places: Saudi Arabia.
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Saudi supercomputer lures researchers
Mon Oct 20, 2008 11:32am EDT
By Asma Alsharif
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) - A new science and technology university in Saudi Arabia will house one of the world's largest supercomputers and it is helping lure top researchers to the conservative desert state.
The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is due to open next year on the Red Sea coast near Jeddah, the most liberal city in a country where religious conservatives have extensive control over society.
Inside the campus, male and female students will be able to mingle freely, contrary to strict gender segregation enforced in most of the country. The university is part of a series of reforms by King Abdullah aiming to open the country up.
"The supercomputer is the cornerstone of this knowledge-based economy that we are seeking," said Majid Al-Ghaslan, in charge of the acquisition, design and development of the "Shaheen" supercomputer.
Named after the peregrine falcon, which reaches speeds of up to 340 kilometers per hour, Shaheen is expected to reach 222 teraflops, a measure equaling a trillion floating point operations per second, Ghaslan said. This will make it sixth most powerful computer in the world.
Shaheen will be able to simulate the Red Sea environment and model oil fields in three dimensions.
Although Saudi Arabia has immense financial resources as the world's biggest oil exporter, the parameters of school and university education are governed by religious strictures and many subjects are even off-limits for women to study.
The new university will offer research in biosciences and bioengineering, material sciences and engineering, applied mathematics and computational sciences.
With a $10 billion donation to its endowment from King Abdullah, it is able to lure experts from around the globe with the promise of almost unlimited funding for research work.
"KAUST is a remarkable addition to the world's resources in high-end computing," said David Keyes, Chair of the Mathematical and Computer Sciences and Engineering Division, who is moving from Columbia University in the United States.
"The machine that is being purchased here is one of the main attractions to me," he said.
The supercomputer will be used by KAUST and its partners including Cornell University, the University of Oxford, Stanford University, and Texas A&M University. |
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HenryTo
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2008 12:16 am Post subject: |
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Stanford's Folding@Home project's current performance about to surpass four petaflops. Note that its performance just surpassed three petaflops a month ago!
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats
At this rate, we should see this approach/surpass five petaflops by the end of October. |
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HenryTo
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