HPCwire: ORNL Makes a Peta-Commitment to Cray

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June 23, 2006

ORNL Makes a Peta-Commitment to Cray

by Michael Feldman, Editor, HPCwire

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Late last week, Cray announced it had signed a $200 million contract with Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to provide the lab with a petaflops-speed supercomputer. Part of the contract will involve upgrading the facility's existing Cray XT3 supercomputer over the next two years. The deployment of the petaflops machine is planned for late 2008.

The contract represents the first purchase of a supercomputer that promises at least one petaflops (peak) performance. ORNL, however, is focused on computing performance for its own big science applications, rather than the petaflops metric itself.

"It is, indeed, the case that this system will have peak speeds of a petaflops," says Thomas Zacharia, Associate Laboratory Director Computing and Computational Sciences ORNL. "However, the system specifications for this machine includes important attributes such as memory, memory bandwidth, interconnect and I/O bandwidth, storage etc., in addition to performance expectations on real applications and benchmarks, which would make this a very balanced machine for petascale applications. Petaflops is an incomplete and inadequate description of the capability of this or any other system."

"The Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory is focused on enabling new discoveries in key science and engineering areas such as nanosciences, biosciences, environmental sciences and energy technologies," continues Zacharia. "We are working with the user communities in defining the key applications focused on delivering petascale science on day one as the machine comes online in late 2008."

So what's a petaflops-speed machine cost these days? Cray is not divulging that information. An unspecified portion of the $200 million will be used to upgrade ORNL's existing "Jaguar" XT3 machine from its current 25 teraflops to an eventual 250 teraflops. This work will be accomplished by replacing the existing single-core Opteron processors with dual-core (and eventually quad-core) versions, as well as by adding more processors to the system. The final upgrade is planned to be completed by the end of 2007.

A year after that, Cray's new 'Baker' class petaflops machine will be installed at ORNL. That system will contain the most advanced Opteron processors available in 2008 timeframe, presumably quad-core or better.

According to Jan Silverman, senior vice president of Corporate Strategy and Business Development at Cray, since they can't predict the exact level of Opteron technology two years in advance, they don't know precisely how many sockets will be required to obtain a petaflops machine. But he expects it will be between 20 and 25 thousand sockets. The exact number will depend on the clock frequency and the overall capability of the Opteron technology in 2008, but the commitment to the petaflops metric will not change.

"That's in the contract," says Silverman. "It will be a petaflops machine."

In relation to its performance, the system will be relatively compact, although Cray is not reporting exactly how much floor space it will occupy. However, Silverman observes that it would be hard to imagine how it could be packed any more densely. A proprietary liquid intercooling system will be used to keep the system at a reasonable operating temperature. It is said to be even more advanced than the cooling technology used for Cray's current big vector machines.

The new supercomputer will also incorporate Cray's next-generation interconnect. Because of the very large number of processors required for this machine, the network technology will be crucial for providing performance for real world supercomputing applications. According to Sliverman, it will borrow elements from the three Cray interconnect technologies represented by the X1/X1E, the XT3, and the XD1 architectures. The three technologies represent different approaches that trade off communication bandwidth and latency with cost, depending upon the intended application of the machine. But, Silverman says the new interconnect promises to be a lot faster than any of these, and with very low latency.

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