Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 01/21/08 issue

Power processing for all

Clusters open high-performance systems to new users — if you set them up right

By Drew Robb, Special to GCN

UNCLE SAM, as a personification of the United States, first started making the rounds during the War of 1812. Uncle Sim is a somewhat more recent incarnation.

Uncle Sim is the nickname given to researchers running simulations at locations such as the Aeronautical Systems Center Major Shared Resource Center (ASC MSRC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. The three supercomputers at the site have explored how the weapons systems on Virginia-class submarines respond to deep-sea pressures, how to protect Humvees from improvised explosive devices, and what conditions send an F-22 fighter jet into a flat spin.

“We can do that much better with simulation than we are able to do with test-and-evaluation or wind-tunnel testing,” said Jeff Graham, ASC MSRC’s technical director.

As part of the Defense Department’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), ASC receives a new supercomputer every two years and retires the oldest system. In October, it added a 9,216-processorcore SGI Altix 4700 system running Red Hat Linux with 20T of shared memory and 440T of usable disk space. Delivering more than 60 teraflops, it raises the center’s capacity to 85 teraflops — more than triple what was available previously.

“We’ve been doing these technology insertions for seven years,” Graham said. “A lot of the lessons learned have been integrated into the [request for proposals] that goes out every year.”

Clusters and code

High-performance computing, or HPC, is one area in which government has a clear lead over the private sector. The 280-teraflop IBM BlueGene/L cluster at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory tops the list of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers (www.top500.org), and five others at federal sites are in the top 10.

In 2008, the National Center for Computational Sciences plans to introduce a petaflop system. The fastest systems make headlines when they set new records, but the real news is what is happening at the low end. Price cuts are making HPC available to organizations without millions to spend.

“Entry-level systems have been one of the major drivers in the market this decade,” said Christopher Willard, senior research consultant at Tabor Communications. “High tech is invading every segment of the market.”

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Enterprise Architecture, Hardware



GCN Popup