HPCwire: DARPA Selects Cray and IBM for Final Phase of HPCS

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HPCwire >> Features

November 24, 2006

DARPA Selects Cray and IBM for Final Phase of HPCS

by Michael Feldman, Editor, HPCwire

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This week, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) selected Cray and IBM as the two Phase III developers for the High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program. Initiated in 2002, the program is designed to produce a new generation of cost-effective, highly productive petascale systems for national security, scientific research and industrial users. The first two phases of HPCS were devoted to critical concept studies and assessments, preliminary research and development, and risk reduction engineering. Over the next four years, the third and final phase of the program will encompass development and demonstration of the HPCS technologies, culminating in a prototype system by each of the two vendors in 2010.

"This is a great day for Cray and the worldwide supercomputing community," said Peter Ungaro, Cray's president and CEO. "The DARPA HPCS program is an important force that is shaping the future of HPC and the entire computer industry. With this Phase III award, DARPA has recognized Cray as a leading innovator with the technology, vision and expertise required to deliver world-class, revolutionary supercomputing systems."

"IBM, DARPA and the mission partners will collaborate to develop a powerful and innovative design that will enhance the ability of supercomputers to help government, businesses and individuals," said Bill Zeitler, senior vice president, IBM Systems and Technology Group. "We believe this new system will accelerate scientific breakthroughs, improve our nation's competitiveness and create new market opportunities."

The DARPA-led program will use money contributed by the NSA and DOE to help fund the effort. Over the next four years, Cray will receive $250 million for their effort, while IBM will receive $244 million. The vendors and their contractors are also expected to make substantial investments in their own systems. According to DARPA, both IBM and Cray are obligated to provide at least 50 percent of the government funding amount in company cost-share.

"The vendors would not be producing these systems where it not for the investment by DARPA." said HPCS program manager William Harrod, in a DARPA conference call on Wednesday. "They of course would have product lines, but they would not be nearly as aggressive in terms of performance and the ability to deliver productivity to their custoners. The key here is the ability to deliver productivity to the users. One can construct large systems, but then using them and getting performance out of them is the significant challenge. That's the problem we're trying to attack here."

Harrod noted that high productivity computing will be a key technology for meeting our national security requirements and to enhance our economic competitiveness. "High productivity computing contributes substantially to the design and development of advanced vehicles and weapons, planning and execution of operational military scenarios, the intelligence problems of cryptanalysis and image processing, the maintenance of our nuclear stockpile, and is a key enabler for science and discovery in security-related fields," he said.

In Phase III of the program, Cray and IBM will complete the hardware and software designs and technical development of their respective systems. The intention is to create machines capable of two petaflops of sustained performance, scalable to four petaflops. This represents a 10-fold performance increase compared to what was available in 2002. Even more significant is the requirement to increase the GUPS (Giga Updates Per Second) performance, which measures a system's ability to perform random memory accesses. This is especially important for applications which process irregular data structures, such as certain critical national security applications. The goal is to achieve GUPS performance of between 8,000 and 64,000. The current high mark goes to IBM Blue Gene/L, which achieves just 35 GUPS.

DARPA has specified some important HPCS Phase III milestones:

   1. Critical design review for software in 18 months.
   2. Critical design review for hardware in 30 months.
   3. Subsystem demonstration in December 2009.
   4. Final prototypes due in 2010.

DARPA will require that the prototype systems developed under HPCS to be at least one quarter of the size needed by the agency's mission partners -- the NSA, DOE and NNSA. By the end of 2010, both Cray and IBM will have to demonstrate functional systems that will be evaluated by selected government HPC users.

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