Argonne's supercomputer named world's fastest for
open science, third overall
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ARGONNE, Ill. (June 18, 2008) — The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE)
Argonne National Laboratory's IBM
Blue Gene/P high-performance computing system
is now the fastest supercomputer in the world for open science, according to
the semiannual Top500 List of the world's fastest computers.
The Top500 List was announced today during the International
Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.
The Blue Gene/P – known as Intrepid and located at the Argonne
Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) – also ranked third fastest overall. Both rankings
represent the first time an Argonne-based supercomputing system has ranked
in the top five of the industry's definitive list of supercomputers.
The Blue Gene/P has a peak-performance of 557 Teraflops (put in other terms,
557 trillion calculations per second). Intrepid achieved a speed of 450.3 Teraflops
on the Linpack application
used to measure speed for the Top500 rankings.
"Intrepid's speed and power reflect the DOE Office of Science's determined
effort to provide the research and development community with powerful tools
that enable them to make innovative and high-impact science and engineering
breakthroughs," said Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for computing,
environmental and life sciences at Argonne.
"The ALCF and Intrepid have only just begun to have a meaningful impact
on scientific research," Stevens said. "In addition, continued expansion
of ALCF computing resources will not only be instrumental in addressing critical
scientific research challenges related to climate change, energy, health and
our basic understanding of the world, but in the future will transform and
advance how science research and engineering experiments are conducted and
attract social sciences research projects, as well."
"Scientists and society are already benefiting from ALCF resources," said
Peter Beckman, ALCF acting director. "For example, ALCF's Blue Gene resources
have allowed researchers to make major strides in evaluating the molecular
and environmental features that may lead to the clinical diagnosis of Parkinson's
disease and Lewy body dementia, as well as to simulate materials and designs
that are important to the safe and reliable use of nuclear energy plants."
Eighty percent of Intrepid's computing time has been set aside for open science
research through the DOE Office
of Science's (SC) highly select Innovative
and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. There
are currently 20 INCITE projects at the ALCF that will use 111 million hours
of computing time this year. SC's Office of Advanced
Scientific Computing Research provides high-level computer power focused on large-scale installation used
by scientists and engineers in many disciplines.
The Top500 List is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University
of Mannheim in
Germany, Jack Dongarra of the University
of Tennessee and Oak Ridge
National Laboratory, and Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of DOE's National
Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory. The list
made its debut in June 1993 and ranked as No. 1 DOE's Los
Alamos National Laboratory's
Thinking Machine Corporation's CM-5, with 1,024 processors and a peak-performance
of 131 gigaflops.
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 Angela Hardin (630/252-5501
or ahardin@anl.gov) at Argonne.
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