Powerful Blue Gene/P supercomputer at Argonne to address
most-challenging science problems
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ARGONNE, Ill. (Nov. 9, 2007) — One of the world's fastest supercomputers
will soon reside at the Argonne Leadership
Computing Facility at the U.S. Department
of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, thanks to a recently
completed contract for the acquisition of a 445-teraflops IBM Blue
Gene/P cluster.
The ALCF's second major acquisition, the Blue Gene/P supercomputer will boost
the facility's total computing power to 556 teraflops, representing a fivefold
increase in system capability. This advance will help to initiate the coming
era of petascale computing and enable experts to answer questions that have
confounded America's scientists for years.
"The ALCF has been a valuable contributor in the development of Blue
Gene/P," said Leo Suarez, head of deep computing at IBM. "The close
working relationship that we enjoy will deliver a machine that will propel
scientific discovery in the most profound way since Galileo's telescope."
The ALCF Blue Gene/P system relies on technology provided by IBM, Myricom and DataDirect
Networks in order to pair world-class processing speeds with advanced
data management capabilities to meet the intense computational strength and
data-storage demands of petascale computing. "Researchers can employ
this new computing resource to attack cutting-edge problems in science and
engineering at unprecedented scale and speed,” said Ray Bair, Argonne's ALCF
director.
The Blue Gene/P can carry out 445 trillion calculations – or flops (short
for floating-point operations) – every second. If all six billion people on
Earth tried to work as fast as the supercomputer, each person would need to
do more than 70,000 additions or multiplications per second to keep up with
it.
The new Blue Gene/P will open to researchers entire realms of scientific inquiry,
from in-depth modeling of climate change to more accurate and complete representations
of exploding supernovas. The complex computations needed to produce the fine
resolution of these models create tremendous volumes of data, from tens to
hundreds of terabytes per run.
The ALCF provides resources for the U.S. Department of Energy's Innovative
and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program,
which seeks computationally intensive research projects from industry, scientific
researchers and research organizations. The 445-teraflops Blue Gene/P will
dramatically increase ALCF resources available to INCITE.
INCITE computations will commonly produce tens to hundreds of terabytes
of data in a single day. "This architecture enables our Blue Gene/P systems
to support the gigantic data flows of petascale applications," Bair said, "like
the time series data that come from biomolecular dynamics, climate models and
astrophysics simulations, to name just a few."
Because the Blue Gene/P can execute so many computations so quickly, the ALCF
also requires a state-of-the-art data-storage system. This system will take
the form of a bank of more than 8,000 disk drives that will send and receive
data from the Blue Gene/P's more than 100,000 processors. Altogether, this
system can deliver nearly 80 billion bytes per second to and from disk – the
equivalent of transferring the content of 100 full CDs every second.
Myricom's economical, low-latency modular switches represent the heart of
the ALCF's data-management system. The nine-switch complex supports up to 2,048
connections, each of which simultaneously exchanges data at around 1 billion
bytes per second.
IBM will also supply 68 file servers to run Argonne's high-performance Parallel
Virtual File System (PVFS2). This bank of servers will manage more than 8 petabytes
of storage on 17 next-generation DataDirect Networks' massively scaleable S2A
storage appliances, which can deliver more than 78 gigabytes per second of sustained
throughput from the array. “Our design can enable the IBM Blue Gene/P to maximize
computational time instead of waiting for I/O operations,” said Alex Bouzari,
CEO of DataDirect Networks.
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology.
The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic
and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne
researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities,
and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific
problems, advance America 's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for
a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed
by UChicago
Argonne, LLC for
the U.S.
Department of Energy's Office
of Science.
For more information, please
contact Steve McGregor (630/252-5580 or media@anl.gov)
at Argonne.
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