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GCN Home > 02/05/07 issue

Super models

Energy puts its power to use on high-resolution modeling programs

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Last year, the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced it would commission the first petascale computer — a computer capable of 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second. The machine, being built by Cray Inc. of Seattle, will use 24,000 2.6-GHz quad-core Opteron processors made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif. Nicknamed Baker, it should top the Top500.org list of the world’s most powerful computers.

That’s nothing new for the department. The latest list, compiled last November, includes five DOE lab supercomputers in the top 10. And one being developed at Los Alamos (Page 23) could be even faster, with more than 32,000 processors.

What kinds of jobs require thousands of processors? Modeling complex physical phenomena, for one. Replicating complex events such as global weather as 2-D or 3-D models can provide insights otherwise not attainable in the laboratory, said Energy’s undersecretary for science Raymond Orbach.

High-end computation “gives us the ability to simulate things which cannot be done experimentally, or for which no theory exists,” Orbach said. And such simulations, Energy officials claim, will keep the country in the forefront of science as well as commercially competitive with the rest of the world. The race is to model events in as high a resolution as possible and make the models as holistic as possible.

The Sharper image
Last month, Energy’s Office of Science, in conjunction with a private-industry consortium called the Council on Competitiveness, awarded computer time on its biggest iron to 45 projects submitted from academia and industry. The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program, or INCITE, received a total of 95 million hours of CPU time on some of the largest Energy machines. The winning proposals will address some of the most difficult problems faced by science and engineering, including deep-science work in accelerator physics, astrophysics, chemical sciences, climate research, engineering physics and environmental science.

These are big jobs. The average one will take a little over 2 million hours of CPU time, equivalent to about 42 days on a 2,000-processor machine or about 228 years on a single desktop computer.

On the commercial side, Boeing Co. will get 200,000 processor hours on Oak Ridge’s Cray X1E to follow up work started in previous years. The company will use the time to study how wind flows around the wings of aircraft it is developing, which has typically required expensive wind tunnels and wing prototypes.

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