HPCwire

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Features

The Cray XT3 - A Unique Resource at PSC


Page:  1  of  4
1 | 2 | 3 | 4   All  »  

Michael Levine (left) and Ralph Roskies (right)The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) is well-known for its cutting-edge research and its ability to transform new technologies into useful scientific tools. Within the past year, PSC's new Cray XT3 supercomputer has been used for some exciting new work and has proved to be one of the most powerful computational resources on the TeraGrid.

HPCwire recently got the opportunity to talk with the two PSC scientific co-directors, Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies, and ask them about new developments at PSC and about what's in store for the center's future. In part one of this two-part interview, Roskies and Levine discuss the significance of PSC's Cray XT3 supercomputer. 

HPCwire: PSC's 10-teraflop Cray XT3, which became a production resource on the TeraGrid last October, was the first Cray XT3 anywhere and is the only one available to NSF researchers. What led you to decide on this system and what advantages does it have as a resource for computational science?

Roskies: We have discovered in the past that if we can bring a substantially new technical capability into production we can open up new fields of science. In particular, we seek systems that when used as a whole make it possible to tackle problems that were previously infeasible.

One particular technical strength of the XT3 that attracted us is its interconnect. Like LeMieux, our HP terascale system that preceded it, the XT3 is a tightly coupled system with a very strong interconnect. The XT3 interconnect is a significant advance in interconnect technology since LeMieux, and it's substantially better than competing systems.

The superior interconnect is a large advantage for projects that demand hundreds or thousands of processors working together. Because of the advanced interconnect, the processors share information much more quickly than they otherwise would, and this makes a very meaningful difference for many of the most demanding kinds of science that can be attacked with supercomputing.

The other feature that attracted us to the XT3 was the excellent balance between processor speed and memory bandwidth that the Opterons display. To realize a larger fraction of peak performance on real scientific applications, one has to be sure that one can supply the processors with enough operands to keep busy.

HPCwire: On a processor-clock basis, the XT3 is 2.4 times faster than LeMieux, your six-teraflop system, yet reports are that the XT3 boosts performance more than ten-fold on some applications. How is this accomplished?

Levine: We've run dozens of codes on the XT3 over the past year, and sometimes we're seeing performance increases of an order of a magnitude and more. There are several factors involved in this. First is the interconnect. As Ralph pointed out, the XT3 interconnect is a substantial improvement over LeMieux. That factor alone represents about an order of magnitude for large-scale parallel applications. This is over and above the speedup from faster processors.

The XT3 also has better memory bandwidth than LeMieux. The interconnect provides the means for each processor to communicate with other processors. Memory bandwidth is the ability of each processor to communicate with its own local memory. Even correcting for the faster processor speed, the memory bandwidth of the XT3 is 33 percent better than LeMieux.

Page:  1  of  4
1 | 2 | 3 | 4   All  »  

HPCwire on Twitter

Article Tools

  • Print This Page
  • Bookmark This Article

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)


Subscribe

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.  

HPC in the Cloud Part 2
People to Watch 2010


Top Headlines

GP-GPUs: OpenCL Is Ready For The Heavy Lifting

Mar 11 | Linux Magazine | CUDA may be the rage, but OpenCL is a standard that has some features you may need. Read more...

Can Free Software Drive the Fourth Paradigm?

Mar 09 | Free Software Magazine | Data-driven computing will need open software. Read more...

Graphics Card Maker Turns to High-Performance Bioinformatics

Mar 09 | Bio-IT World | Tahoe Informatics founder eyes GPUs, CUDA software. Read more...

CFD: Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Mar 08 | Sporting Life | Formula One engineers differ on benefits of CFD. Read more...

AMD Tries to Draw Intel Into Chip Battle

Mar 08 | InfoWorld | AMD offers up 48-core server prize. Read more...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html

SC09 HPC in the Cloud

Newsletters

Stay informed! Subscribe to HPCwire email Newsletters.






HPC Job Bank


Featured Events

HPC User Forum DICE
2010 High Performance Computing Linux Financial Markets
Cloud Computing Expo
Cloud Slam
ESC
DEISA PRACE Symposium