HPCwire: Accelerating Knowledge Discovery

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May 12, 2006

Accelerating Knowledge Discovery

by Michael Feldman, Editor, HPCwire

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As chief technology officer and senior vice president of SGI, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, has been the driver behind SGI's Project Ultraviolet, the incubator for the company's next-generation, computer platforms. He has been evangelizing the Ultraviolet technologies for some time now, most recently at the HPCC conference in March. With the release of the Altix 4700 platform last month, some of these advanced technologies are now commercially available.

One major focus of Project Ultraviolet is to address the problem of dealing with the enormous databases that are becoming commonplace in both government and industry. Databases in the multi-terabyte, and even petabyte range are no longer exceptional. In particular, a growing number of government agencies have a critical need to perform much more intensive knowledge discovery with these rapidly-growing datasets. But because of the sheer size of the datasets, current HPC systems have difficulty extracting knowledge from them in an efficient manner.

"Because of that, over the years we have been increasingly investing in what we call accelerated knowledge discovery," said Goh. "We're employing a part of [the Ultraviolet technology] to target this particular problem."

In April of this year, SGI began delivering their new Altix 4700 platform, which is capable of addressing these knowledge discovery challenges. They already have customers who are using their older systems for this capability, but will benefit greatly from the new Altix 4700 technology.

The basis of the new architecture is the inclusion of much larger amounts of memory, enough to accommodate these extremely large datasets. SGI will use its globally shared memory architecture to allow users to store entire databases -- or very large subsets of them -- in memory, enabling the data to be processed much more quickly by the system's processors.

"We are talking on the order of multi-terabyte memory, managed by a single operating system," said Goh.

SGI has already shipped more than a dozen SGI systems with over a terabyte of memory and about a hundred systems of half a terabyte or larger. But the new Altix will have much larger memory capacities. The systems SGI has in mind will scale to tens of terabytes and beyond. In fact, a few SGI customers are already testing with systems in the 10-terabyte range. "The largest we have shipped is a 13-terabyte memory system for the Japan Atomic Energy Agency," said Goh.

The new Altix 4700 increases the memory headroom significantly, scaling up to 128 terabytes of memory. According to Goh, the physical addressing capability of the Intel Itanium architecture, used on all Altix platforms, is a good fit for these large globally shared memory systems. The x86 class of processors, although they are 64-bit capable, have a 40-bit physical address limit which constrains them to a one terabyte memory reach.

"These x86 processors are ideal for clusters, because they only have to address memory for a single node, explained Goh. "But increasingly, our customers need to go way beyond that. They require every processor in our entire network to see all of the memory of all nodes. The Itanium is the only processor I know of that has enough physical addressing space to cover more than a terabyte."

But it's not just a matter of big memory; high performing I/O is required as well. The standard Linux I/O performance of one gigabyte-per-second is not adequate. And even this performance level can be a stretch for a single instance of the Linux operating system.

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