HPCwire: IBM Has Its PERCS

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April 07, 2006

IBM Has Its PERCS

, PERCS/HPCS Principal Investigator

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Overview

The High Productivity Computing System (HPCS) program offers IBM an exciting opportunity to target stretch goals and consider bold ideas, all within the realistic constraints of delivering innovation in a commercially viable product. For over four and a half years our team has been focused on applications of the high-end computing community and exploring new technologies that will introduce fundamental and exciting changes in the way we program and use high-end systems. IBM envisions a quantum leap in performance and productivity providing compelling differentiation to high-value systems compared to so-called commodity clusters, and making programming parallel systems an attractive end user experience.

The PERCS (Productive, Easy-to-Use, Reliable Computing System) team members come from IBM, Los Alamos National Laboratory and a dozen universities. During phases one and two of the HPCS program, the team collaborated to examine new ideas that span the entire computing stack, from basic technology to algorithms. The result is a concept system that will be based on IBM's mainstream POWER processor-based servers. We envision technologies resulting from the PERCS effort to start appearing in IBM systems as early as 2007 (in software), culminating into several peta-level systems by the middle of 2011 (assuming the IBM-HPCS relationship continues through Phase 3). The technology will also serve a broad range of configurations, especially those in small-scale deployments, and as a result we expect to reach more than just those interested only in the maximum configuration of the system.

This article summarizes our vision, our general approach, and the challenges of petascale computing. The competitive nature of the program and the impending down selection bid into phase 3 of HPCS means that we cannot reveal the details of our design or technologies, but we hope to provide a glimpse of what we are considering and to instill an appreciation of the issues involved in petascale systems.

A Vision for 2010

The following section is devoted to IBM's projections - a vision for 2010. IBM believes high productivity systems in 2010 will feature a rich programming environment with many tools that help in programming new applications, and maintaining existing ones. The programming environment will support existing programming models and languages, in addition to new emerging models designed for scalability to the peta-level. An application can be written using a mix of legacy and new programming languages, promoting code and asset reuse while availing programmers to the advantages of newer technologies. Open source communities will own many of the tools and parts the software stack. This will help ensure viability for the long term and promote a common look-and-feel and portability across different architectures. Tools will automate most or many of the performance tuning tasks and catch bugs statically, and newer programming models will be designed to prevent unnecessary bugs from happening in the first place (e.g. illegal memory referencing, deadlock, demonic access of shared variables, out of bound matrix indexing, etc.).

IBM expects the HPCS systems will be managed via rich graphical interfaces that automate many of the monitoring and recovery tasks, enabling fewer system administrators to handle larger systems more effectively. Through the WAN, users will potentially be able to share their data files and programs across the HPCS system and other clusters across the enterprise in a seamless manner. Open source operating systems and hypervisors will provide HPC-oriented virtualization, security, resource management, affinity control, resource limits, checkpoint-restart and reliability features that will improve the robustness and availability of the system.

The systems likely will feature balanced and flexible architectures that adapt to application needs. Innovations in the memory subsystem and inter-process communications will mitigate the effects of data access latency locally or across an Interconnect. The result will be better utilization of resources and an unprecedented performance leap along the four components of the HPC Challenge benchmark. Advanced packaging and water cooling will reduce system footprint with computing densities double today's best systems.

Approach

The HPCS program calls for a departure from the traditional myopic focus on performance to consider instead the broader value that a system provides, i.e. productivity. Time-to-solution, performance, portability and robustness are the dimensions of the productivity space according to the HPCS program vision. These dimensions may sometimes lead to conflicting requirements. For instance, the desire for portability imposes restrictions that can limit the range of innovations that one may consider for performance. Similarly, high-level abstractions that reduce the difficulty of programming entail a performance and resource overhead. Throughout the course of the program our team discarded some interesting ideas that could improve one aspect of the productivity proposition at the expense of the others. To address these tradeoffs, we used "real application" analysis and held countless discussions with the user community.

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