New Argonne supercomputer makes 'Top 500' list
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ARGONNE, Ill. (Nov. 21, 2007) – A new high-performance computer cluster at
the Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) at the U.S. Department of Energy's
(DOE) Argonne National Laboratory is number 150 on the list of the world's
500 fastest computers. The new cluster, capable of performing up to 12 trillion
floating-point operations per second, is currently the fastest computer at
Argonne, at least until the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer being installed
at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility is finished.
The list was released Monday, Nov. 12, at the SC07 Supercomputing Conference
in Reno, Nev.
The cluster was designed from the ground up to support research at the CNM.
The CNM has five experimental and one theory and modeling group, and as a user
facility, will host hundreds of users, many requiring top-flight computer power
and generating mountains of data. Some of this data must be processed in real
time while experiments are under way, so that samples can be repositioned or
instruments can be adjusted as needed for fine-tuning.
"When one tackles problems in computational nanoscience, one can no longer
rely on the objects being studied having just small numbers of atoms or molecules,
or being part of a periodic crystal," said Senior Scientific Associate Michael
Sternberg, who helped design the machine. "Nanoscale materials are in between
these two extremes, which is why this is such an exciting field. The usual
simplifying assumptions are not applicable, so these problems require a very
high capacity for computing and memory."
The new cluster is a black box the size of three refrigerators side by side.
Inside are stacks of "compute nodes," 72 in all, each about the size
of a large pizza box. Every node has two motherboards, each with two quad-core
Intel Xeon chips operating at 2.66 gigahertz. Each motherboard holds a generous
16 gigabytes of memory. An InfiniBand network
provides rapid communications between nodes. With tuning support from Intel and
by the cluster's vendor, TeamHPC,
the cluster has been measured at 10 teraflops, making it Argonne's fastest
computer.
"Of course that will be a short-lived honor," Sternberg said, "just until
the new BlueGene/P is first operational."
The setup is optimized for the kind of software that many nanoscience researchers
use such as MATLAB and Dacapo.
"These are programs that help to process data and solve problems in quantum
chemistry and materials science," Sternberg said. "The cluster will run them
very efficiently."
The cluster will be available to all researchers via a peer-reviewed user
proposal system that is open to academia, industry, government agencies and
research institutes worldwide.
The cluster is currently being readied for general use by early 2008.
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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