supercomputing

The director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications has seen the future of supercomputing and it can be summed up in three letters: GPU.

Thom Dunning, who directs the NCSA and the Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies at the famed supercomputing facilities on the campus of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says high-performance computing will begin to move toward graphics processing units or GPUs. Not coincidentally, this is exactly what China has done to achieve the world's fastest speeds with its "Tianhe-1A" supercomputer. That computer combines about 7,000 Nvidia GPUs with 14,000 Intel CPUs: the only hybrid CPU-GPU system in the world of that scale.

"What we're really seeing in the efforts in China as well as the ones we have in the U.S. is that GPUs are what the future will look like," said Dunning in a phone interview Thursday. "What we're seeing is the beginning of something that's going to be happening all over the world."

NCSA already has a small CPU-GPU hybrid system. "It's something we have been working on for a number of years. We have a CPU-GPU cluster for the NCSA academic community. Made up of Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. A 50 teraflop machine," he said. (Note that Oak Ridge National Laboratories is also installing a hybrid system now.)

But it's not going to be a snap to tap into the processing potential of GPUs. "Programming these machines to do [GPU] calculations is still a very substantial effort. There will be some applications that will be rewritten to use GPUs [but] a lot of times it will be only part of an application that will use it so you won't get nearly the power and computing advantage of running it all on the GPU," he said.

The catalyst to move programmers en masse toward GPUs will be when chips appear that combine both high-performance CPU and high-level GPU functions on the same piece of silicon, Dunning said. "If they start to solve some of these other problems like… Read more

With China expected to officially take the supercomputer performance crown next month, I asked an expert about the state of supercomputing in the U.S. and whether China poses a long-term threat to the United States' current preeminence in supercomputing.

Nvidia announced yesterday that its chips are powering the "Tianhe-1A" Chinese supercomputer that achieved 2.507 petaflops, beating a U.S.-based system that is currently ranked No. 1 on the June Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The Chinese system is a unique hybrid design that uses approximately 7,000 Nvidia graphics chips along with 14,000 Intel Xeon CPUs. The graphics chips are what give the system the extra oomph to catapult it into the top supercomputer spot.

I spoke with Jack Dongarra, university distinguished professor at University of Tennessee's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and part of a group from the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and Georgia Tech that recently purchased a hybrid system. It is important to note that Oak Ridge houses the supercomputer, dubbed "Jaguar," cited above that is currently ranked No. 1 in the world based on the Top500 June list: it is not a hybrid system.

Q: Does Oak Ridge have anything analogous to the Chinese hybrid system? Dongarra: Oak Ridge has a small version of a machine that is hybrid in nature. So, this is an acquisition that just took place...out of a grant from the National Science Foundation. It involved Oak Ridge National Labs, University of Tennessee, and Georgia Tech. But it's much, much smaller than the Chinese system. The machine is in place and testing is being carried out at Oak Ridge. A node has two Intel Westmere chips and three Nvidia Fermi boards. There are… Read more

These days, the Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers is dominated by cluster designs assembled from many independent computing nodes. But there's still a place in the world for an earlier approach, as evidenced by a new machine called Blacklight at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

Blacklight is a mammoth $2.8 million shared-memory machine built by SGI for the center. The system comes in two halves, each with 16 terabytes of shared memory. Either half would be the largest such amount of memory so far built, PSC said, and with a bit more programming effort, the … Read more

Fujitsu has begun shipping the brains of a new Japanese supercomputer to be built at the government-funded RIKEN research institute and designed to perform 10 quadrillion mathematical calculations per second.

The system, called K, is massive. It's planned to have 800 racks of computing gear housing 80,000 of Fujitsu's SPARC 64 VIIIfx processors running at 2.2GHz, Fujitsu said. The processors will be interconnected with a high-capacity direct-connection network that permits fast communications between neighbors.

Although the system is under construction now, it won't be ready for production use until 2012, Fujitsu said.

The system initially … Read more

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will develop an exascale supercomputer, as Moore's Law and conventional computing designs begin hitting a wall, the government agency said Friday.

DARPA's Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program seeks "to create an innovative, revolutionary new generation of computing systems that overcomes the limitations of current evolutionary approach," the agency said in a statement. Companies involved in the project include Intel and Nvidia.

The UHPC program addresses priorities set out by President Obama's "Strategy for American Innovation" to achieve "exascale" and energy-efficient computing, DARPA said. One … Read more

Since computer scientists and biochemists at the University of Washington launched a project in 2008 that taps into the brainpower of computer gamers to fold proteins, almost 60,000 people around the world have taken on the challenge.

In the process, Foldit players have been able to best computers on problems that require radical moves, risks, and long-term vision, according to results being published on Thursday, in the journal Nature.

"The really fundamental question in most scientists' minds was, 'What can it produce, in terms of results? Is there any evidence that it's doing something useful?'" says … Read more

A new start-up called Whamcloud is coming out of stealth mode Wednesday with $10 million in private funding and a notion to disrupt the often academic world of supercomputing by leveraging the Lustre open-source project.

According to CEO Brent Gorda, the company is targeting the need for high-performance storage solutions based on the popular combination of Linux and Lustre for application and data storage environments. The company plans to offer support and services initially, with an eye toward a turnkey supercomputing setup with hardware and software components, in the future.

For those less familiar with supercomputing technologies, Lustre is a … Read more

A new option for Amazon Web Services has arrived: the raw computing power of supercomputing clusters now widely used in research circles.

The service, called Cluster Compute, is a variation of one of the earliest services Amazon offered, EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud. Compared with the standard EC2, Cluster Compute offers more processing power and faster network connections among the cluster's computing nodes for better communications, Amazon said Tuesday. The service retains the same general philosophy, though: customers pay as they go, with more usage incurring more fees.

The cluster service, which is available with Linux and a customer'… Read more

The U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and its Jaguar system kept the No. 1 spot on the Top500 list of fastest supercomputers, but China's new Nebulae is close behind at No. 2.

The Top500 list was presented June 31 at the ISC'10 Conference held in Hamburg, Germany. The rankings are compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Nebulae, which emerged late last year as China's big entry into … Read more