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Posted by yogi am 2004/11/6 13:19:23 IBM said that its Blue Gene/L supercomputer trumps the performance of SGI's recently announced Columbia system installed at NASA by more than 65 percent. It nearly doubles the speed of the Earth Simulator, which currently tops the list of the 500 fastest supercomputers.
The speed of 70.7 teraflops, as expected, puts Blue Gene/L well ahead of the 42.7 teraflops Silicon Graphics Inc. announced in October for its Columbia system, as well as the 51.9 teraflops that the full Columbia configuration is expected to be able to reach. The companies are vying for the top spot in a list of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers. The list will be updated Monday.
In addition, the new speed definitively bested a Japanese system, NEC's Earth Simulator, that has led the Top500 list for two years. The Blue Gene/L lead could increase when the system quadruples in size from its current configuration with 16 racks and more than 16,000 dual-core processors. The improvement will be made by May, IBM says.
The U.S. Energy Department, which is paying for the machine through its Advanced Simulation and Computing program, said the system will boost research in the United States.
"The delivery of the first quarter of the BlueGene/L system to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory this month shows how a partnership between government and industry can effectively advance national agendas in science, technology, security and industrial competitiveness,” Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said in a statement.
Livermore will use the system for materials science simulations, said Lynn Kissel, deputy director of the lab's Advanced Simulation and Computing program. Compared with current technology, Blue Gene/L will make simulations possible with roughly 1,000 times as many atoms--enough that the simulations can be compared with real-world experiments.
The list to be revealed Monday represents one of the twice-yearly updates to the Top500 list; the new list will be unveiled at the SC2004 show in Pittsburgh. The long domination of the NEC machine had raised some concerns among government officials that the United States was losing its supercomputing edge. IBM tried to allay those concerns when an earlier incarnation of Blue Gene/L edged past Earth Simulator in September.
Blue Gene/L currently is running at an IBM lab in Rochester, Minn., but the 16 racks will be delivered to Livermore this month, said Tilak Agerwala, vice president of systems for IBM Research.
Supercomputers are ranked according to a speed test called Linpack, a convenient but incomplete reflection of true performance. The benchmark reflects the performance of roughly a quarter of the codes the Livermore lab plans to run on the Blue Gene/L, Kissel said.
"Everyone agrees Linpack is not the right metric, but no one agrees what the right metric is," he said.
The full Blue Gene/L is expected to have a theoretical top speed of 360 teraflops, though the Top500 is based on the more realistic measurement of sustained performance. Agerwala said the full system likely will have efficiency in the same neighborhood as the current model, a prediction that could rate the full system at about 270 teraflops.
Battle of the Goliaths
 | 1: Earth Simulator Center, Japan
2: Intel Itanium2 Tiger4 1.4GHz, Quadrics
3: ASCI Q - AlphaServer SC45, 1.25 GHz
4: Blue Gene/L DD1 Prototype (0.5GHz PowerPC 440 w/Custom)
5: PowerEdge 1750, P4 Xeon 3.06 GHz, Myrinet
6: eServer pSeries 690 (1.9 GHz Power4+)
7: Riken Super Combined Cluster
8: Blue Gene/L DD2 Prototype (0.7 GHz PowerPC 440)
9: Integrity rx2600 Itanium2 1.5 GHz, Quadrics
10: Dawning 4000A, Opteron 2.2 GHz, Myrinet
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The US Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham confirmed that the machine had reached the breakneck speed, according to the Linpack benchmark.
Until the official list is published, however, Blue Gene/L's position will not be confirmed, and there are expected to be some other new entries.
But the test results raise the bar of supercomputing enormously and signal a remarkable achievement. Surpassing the 40 teraflop mark has been considered a landmark for some time.
The IBM Blue Gene/L is only a prototype and is one 10th the speed of the full version, due to be completed for the Livermore labs in 2005.
Its peak performance is expected to be 360 teraflops, and will fit into 64 full racks. It will also cut down on the amount of heat generated by the massive power, a big problem for supercomputers.
The final machine will help scientists work out the safety, security and reliability requirements for the US's nuclear weapons stockpile, without the need for underground nuclear testing.
The Earth Simulator has held on to the top spot since June 2002. It is dedicated to climate modelling and simulating seismic activity.
But in September, IBM said that another Blue Gene/L machine clocked up 36.01 teraflops, marginally surpassing the Earth Simulator's performance.
This was achieved during internal testing at IBM's production facility in Rochester, Minnesota though, so was not an official record.
Another giant to enter the fray is Nasa's Columbia supercomputer based at its Ames Research Center in California. Its mission is to model flight missions, climate research, and aerospace engineering.
The Linux-based machine was reported to have reached a top speed of 42.7 teraflops a second in October.
Great challenges
Supercomputers are hugely important for working out very complex problems across science and society.
Their massive simulation and processing power means they can improve the accuracy of weather forecasts, help design better cars, and improve disease diagnosis, as well as environmental research.
IBM's senior vice president of technology and manufacturing, Nick Donofrio, believes that by 2006, Blue Gene will be capable of petaflop computing.
This means it would be capable of doing 1,000 trillion operations a second.
 | | This image modeled by Bluegene illustrates how computational biology techniques can be used to help understand the characteristics needed to design effective drug compounds to fight disease. The image shows a portion of the surface of the reverse transcriptase enzyme of the HIV-I virus with a molecular model of an inhibitor drug compound bound to the enzyme's receptor pocket. An inhibitor drug blocks the action of the enzyme, disabling its function and thus crippling the virus. The colors mapped on the surface show extremes in the electrostatic potential of the surface and lines which represent the electrostatic field in the vicinity of the receptor pocket. In order to work, a potential inhibitor must have both the right shape and the right electrostatic characteristics to attach itself to the enzyme to disable it. |
"When you get a computer as large as a petaflop, you can start to think of simulations that might complement the physical world," Mr Donofrio recently told the BBC News
"You can start to be more proactive, more interactive and more innovative."
One area where Mr Donofrio sees supercomputing, and Blue Gene machines in particular, as crucial is health.
He sees the machines as being able to help scientists understand one of the greatest challenges of the 21st Century, protein folding.
"Health is one of the most important problems, not just mapping the human genome, but also protein structures.
"We are a great believer in simulation. It gives you another tool," he said.
Once the structure of proteins are understood fully, then drugs can be tailor-made to fight diseases more effectively.
Compared to the current fastest supercomputers, Blue Gene is designed to consume one 15th the power and 10 times more compact.
Since the first supercomputer, the Cray-1, was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976, computational speed has leaped 500,000 times.
The Cray-1 was capable of 80 megaflops (80 million operations a second). The Blue Gene/L machine that will be completed next year will be five million times faster.
Started in 1993, the Top 500 list is decided by a group of computer science academics from around the world. It is presented at the International Supercomputer Conference in Pittsburgh.
Secret sauce behind Bluegenes ticking
The secret sauce is not cramming in more faster processors. It is making the access of data within the networked system faster. The bottleneck which is faced by any computing architecture with a fast processor is centered around the data transfer speed.
There is no point in crunching a huge amount of numbers in a sec that takes ages to be transferred from & back to the memory or the process requesting the action. So Blue gene has as its sauce higher access rate and data transfer rate.
The Blue Gene/L design will run these applications much faster because the machine will be populated with data-chip cells optimized for data access.
Each chip includes two processors: one for computing and one for communicating, and its own on-board memory. Each of the data-chip cells will work on a small part of a larger problem.
This increase in data access speed will make a huge difference in the kinds of results these machines can produce and the kinds of problems they can solve.
"Machines like Blue Gene/L are designed to handle data-intensive applications like content distribution, simulations, and modeling, webserving, data mining or business intelligence," added Dean.
NNSA’s Bill Reed, ASCI’s national program leader, lists an impressive array of projects that can make use of this new approach and cites "the continuing need for cost-effective computing to address important national security issues. We need to run these problems in days not months and we need to simultaneously support many scientists across all three NNSA laboratories working on a broad spectrum of technical issues. The value to both national security programs and commercial interests can be dramatic, especially in the biological sciences and medical and pharmaceutical fields."
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