‘Edison’ Lights Up Research at NERSC

By Tiffany Trader

January 31, 2014

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center, located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has taken acceptance of “Edison,” a Cray XC30 supercomputer named in honor of famed American inventor Thomas Alva Edison.

resizedimage700346-Edison-head-on

The important milestone occurs just as NERSC is commemorating 40 years of scientific advances, prompting NERSC Director Sudip Dosanjh to comment: “As we celebrate NERSC’s 40th anniversary, it’s quite fitting we start the year by dedicating Edison, a system that embodies our guiding principle over the last four decades: computing in the service of science.”

Edison has a peak computational output of 2.4 petaflops, but NERSC officials like to emphasize the machine’s sustained performance on real applications. NERSC’s 5,000 researchers publish an average of 1,700 peer-reviewed research articles every year, surpassing the productivity of all other DOE Office of Science computing centers.

In line with supporting productive science for NERSC’s diverse community of researchers, Edison was built and configured to accommodate both traditional modeling and simulation workloads as well as the growing body of data analytics work.

In an earlier interview with HPCwire, Jeff Broughton, NERSC deputy for operations and leader of the Edison procurement, reported that NERSC’s user community is seeing “a big increase in data-intensive computing, with a focus on high throughput and single-node performance.” Thus the center needed a system that could “meet the needs of data-intensive applications while continuing to support conventional HPC.”

Tracing the changing paradigm, Director Dosanjh explains that historically NERSC exported most of its data, but that situation has flipped. NERSC still transmits data from large-scale simulations to other sites, but there’s even more experimental data coming in the door, such that NERSC is now a net importer. The center takes in a petabyte of data each month, much of it related to the biosciences, climate and high-energy physics.

Accomplishing this mixed-mode capability requires a balanced approach to system design. Simulating and modeling complex phenomena has always pushed the limits of computation. Such workloads benefit from a large number of tightly-coupled processors, but don’t necessarily need a lot of memory per CPU. Data analysis problems, like genome sequencing and searching for new materials, on the other hand, perform better with more memory per node. At one time, analysis workloads were compatible with small clusters, but with increasing data loads, they are outgrowing the smaller machines.

“If you have a computing resource like Edison, one with the flexibility to run different classes of problems, then you can apply the full capacity of your system to the problem at hand, whether that be high-throughput genome sequencing or highly parallel climate simulations,” Broughton explains.

To ensure optimal results across application types, data movement cannot be constrained. To that point, the Cray XC30 machine has been outfitted with a high speed interconnect, very high memory bandwidth as well as high memory per node. It also has very high input/output speeds (140 gigabytes per second) to the file system and disk system.

“Data movement is the limiting factor for a large fraction of the 600 codes that run at NERSC,” Dosanjh told HPCwire in April. “Floating point units are often idle waiting for data to arrive. Many codes spend a few percent of their total runtime performing floating point operations, the rest of the time is spent accessing memory or calculating memory addresses. Edison will be a very effective platform for running the very broad range of science codes at NERSC.”

An official dedication ceremony for Edison will be held at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) on Feb. 5.

Here is a snapshot of the system’s specs:

  • 332 terabytes memory
  • 2.39 petaflops of peak performance
  • 124,608 processing cores
  • 462 terabytes/second global memory bandwidth
  • 11 terabytes/second network bisection bandwidth
  • 7.56 petabytes disk storage
  • 163 gigabytes/second I/O bandwidth
Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

Nvidia Appoints Andy Grant as EMEA Director of Supercomputing, Higher Education, and AI

March 22, 2024

Nvidia recently appointed Andy Grant as Director, Supercomputing, Higher Education, and AI for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). With over 25 years of high-performance computing (HPC) experience, Grant brings a Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the fi Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire