HPCwire: PSC Directors Interview, Part II: The Road Ahead

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June 16, 2006

PSC Directors Interview, Part II: The Road Ahead

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In the second part of our interview with Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies, the two scientific co-directors at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), they talk about the LeMieux computer, the PSC approach to supercomputing, and the challenges that lie ahead for the center. To read part one of the interview, where they talked extensively about the center's Cray XT3 system, go to http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/686730.html.

HPCwire: LeMieux, your 3,000-processor six-teraflop HP system, which came into service in 2001, was the first NSF terascale system and for several years was the most powerful system available to NSF researchers. At soon-to-be five-years old, it's still one of the most used TeraGrid resources. What are your plans for this system and how much longer can it be useful?

Levine: It can be useful for a very long time. It's a question of how long it will continue to be cost effective. If Moore's Law holds, the amount of computing you can get from initial dollar capitalization keeps improving. On a monthly cost basis, this is a matter of maintenance costs. Likewise with the amount of computing per watt. Power is a large cost factor.

Roskies: At some point, it will no longer be cost effective and we will by then have transitioned the users to the XT3. No one will be left hanging.

Levine: Technically, LeMieux turned out to be a very good machine and continues to be a very good machine, very useful; it's not at a breaking point in any serious sense.

HPCwire: PSC has gained a reputation for its ability to take the leap with new technologies and transform them quickly into productive research tools. Going back to the CRAY Y-MP through half-a-dozen systems up to the XT3, you've received early, if not the first, models of new systems. What are the advantages of this approach? Are there disadvantages?

Roskies: The advantage is the payoff to the scientific community - because new machines will soon enough be sunsetted, as determined by the pace of technological development. So if you can get machines early in their cycle, it means you can use them longer. The earlier you get it, the more science you can get done in the useful lifetime of that machine.

Levine: Also, you bring that capability to the scientific community earlier. You could, of course, wait to introduce any new system into the open research community until it's more mature. But we can get productive use out of this early period, which means it's producing science that much sooner. And it allows us to have more influence with the vendors for the course of development of the system and its application to the NSF research community. This has certainly been the case for our involvement with the XT3 at the Sandia stage.

Roskies: The disadvantage is that there's more work by our systems staff than if we simply waited until the bugs get worked out. The machine would be better understood and it would be less effort to make it available. Of course, we're a major force in making it better understood, so not only are we improving things for our own users, we're improving it for everybody else's XT3 users. Somebody would have to discover these bugs. You can't avoid them.

A benefit to PSC is the cumulative aggregation of knowledge and experience that our staff gain in the process of birthing new systems, over and over, with various vendors and architectures.

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