The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
July 13, 2007
ORNL Closes In On Petascale Computing
1 | 2 | 3 All »
As a Department of Energy leadership computing facility, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) employs some of some of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. Buddy Bland, project director of ORNL's Leadership Computing Facility, discusses the challenges of computing at very large scale -- with "peta" around the corner and "exa" on the distant horizon.
HPCwire: Oak Ridge's "Jaguar" system is now number two on the Top500 list, compared to number ten last November. That's a big performance leap. How is this helping your users?
Bland: The huge leap in "Jaguar's" effective computing power is giving scientists the tools they need to solve really big, important problems -- scientifically important problems and, through the industrial portion of the DOE INCITE program, economically important problems as well. That's the whole reason for the leadership computing initiative that Dr. Orbach put forward and that ORNL won in 2004.
Climate scientists are using the system to develop the next generation of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM). Peter Gent of NCAR [National Center for Atmospheric Research], who is chair of the CCSM Scientific Steering Committee, said that the performance of CCSM on Jaguar was "out of our dreams" at a blistering 40 simulated years per day. He said recent improvement to the simulation of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation in CCSM is the most impressive new result in ten years.
Fusion researchers are using "Jaguar" to simulate the multinational ITER fusion reactor, a device that will bring the world closer to a clean, abundant energy source by heating an ionized gas ten times hotter than the sun. The AORSA fusion application has achieved 87.5 teraflops on "Jaguar" for the dominant computational kernel. This is 74 percent of the system's theoretical peak.
On the industrial side, a team led by Jihui Yang of General Motors is using the system to perform first-principles calculations of thermoelectric materials capable of turning waste heat into electricity. The team's goal is to help automakers capture that 60 percent of the energy generated by an automobile's engine that is currently lost through waste heat and to use it to boost fuel economy. These calculations would not have been possible if the scientists had not had access to the leadership computing resources of the Energy Department. This is another great example of how computational simulation can contribute to scientific advances and energy security. There are many more examples.
HPCwire: You serve a relatively small number of users who have really big problems, meaning codes that exploit a large fraction of your systems. What special things do you do to serve these high-end users?
Bland: It takes a lot of personal attention. Computers at the scale of the top five of the Top500 list are so much larger than what most people have ever had access to. To increase the ease of use and productivity, we established our Scientific Computing Group, led by Dr. Ricky Kendall. Members of this group act as liaisons between the computer center and the computational projects. They have Ph.D.'s in relevant scientific disciplines and many years of experience working with high-performance computers. They help users port, tune and optimize their codes. This includes and often requires modification, augmentation or a change of algorithms and implementations. Only a modest number of existing codes have parallelized the I/O, so getting data in and out of the computers can be a serious issue. Providing this kind of expert assistance to each code team and working closely with them is one of the real keys to making these leadership-class machines productive.
Equally important is our User Assistance and Outreach Group, led by Dr. Julia White. This group is intimately familiar with the day-to-day functioning of the machines. Group members help our users fix broken code and ensure the codes are behaving as intended. These two groups and their dedication to delivering successful science for LCF users are especially important because state-of-the-art supercomputers, like all high-performance machines, can be very unforgiving.
HPCwire: There's a Cray Center of Excellence at ORNL. What role does that play?
Page: 1 of 31 | 2 | 3 All »
Article Tools
Share Options
(Digg, Technorati, more)
Subscribe
Sponsored Links
New Paper: Parallel Computing Without Parallel Programming
Learn how domain experts can run VHLL programs like MATLAB® on a variety of high-performance platforms without low-level reprogramming and how to work with the largest datasets and complex algorithms without sacrificing ease of use or reducing productivity.
RSS Feeds
Feeds by Topic
- Applications
- Developer Tools
- Interconnects
- Middleware
- Networks
- Processors
- Storage
- Systems
- Visualization
Feeds by Industry
Feeds by Content Type
Top Headlines
3D Seismic Data: Taking a Smarter Approach to Interpretation
Jul 09 | Engineer Live | The demand for computational tools to underpin the 3D seismic interpretation process has never been more apparent. Read more...
Engineering Unemployment Soared in 2Q to 8.6%
Jul 08 | EE Times | Unemployment for U.S. engineers has reached record levels, according to government figures. Read more...
Gartner Adjusts 2009 IT Spend Downward Again
Jul 08 | Network World | Global spending for 2009 projected to drop 6 percent, for a total of $3.2 trillion. Read more...
Concurrent and Parallel Are Not The Same
Jul 08 | Linux Magazine | Portability or efficiency? Neither is guaranteed when writing explicit parallel code. Read more...
800 TFLOP Real-Time Ray Tracing GPU Unveiled, Not for Gamers
Jul 07 | Ars Technica | Japanese company builds custom ASIC to accelerate real-time ray traced rendering for the auto industry. Read more...
Featured Whitepapers
Parallel Computing Without Parallel Programming
Jul 10 | | Engineers, scientists, and other domain experts depend on the productivity enabled by very high-level language (VHLL) tools like MATLAB® and Python. However, as datasets grow larger and programs get more sophisticated, ordinary desktop computers can no longer keep up. The paper explores how to run VHLL programs on high-performance platforms without low-level reprogramming. Work with large datasets and complex algorithms without sacrificing ease of use or reducing productivity.
Building High Performance Computing in a Green and Modular Solution Building Block
Apr 14 | | Many HPC IT departments are feeling the rising pressure to deliver more capacity computing and performance while trying to reduce the total cost of ownership. This white paper discusses how an environmentally-friendly and open-standards HPC building block based computing system using flexible interconnect options helps address capacity computing needs.
Multimedia
Webcast: Dell Expands HPC Access and Adoption with Intel Cluster Ready Program
Source: Addison Snell, GM/VP, Tabor Research; sponsored by Dell
Many organizations that could benefit from the use of HPC clusters find that it is complicated to get the systems up and running because of limited IT resources or the complexities of the clusters themselves. Learn how the Intel Cluster Ready program, for which Dell was an original partner, seeks to address this challenge for entry level and mid-range HPC users.
Video White Paper: Architecting a Better Network Storage Solution
BlueArc's Titan architecture represents an evolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale bandwidth, IOPS, and overall data capacity well beyond conventional software-based devices. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to four usable petabytes of tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements, offering a competitive advantage for businesses, researchers, or other enterprises seeking to better manage data growth while still ensuring optimal performance.
Webcast: HPC Development Solutions: Sun Studio & Sun HPC ClusterTools
Sun Studio Compilers and Tools and Sun HPC ClusterTools allow you to create high performance parallel applications for OpenSolaris, Solaris and Linux. Sun Studio Express 11/08 includes MPI performance analysis capabilities and full OpenMP 3.0 compiler support. Learn about all this and the latest in Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1.
Newsletters
Stay informed! Subscribe to HPCwire email Newsletters.
HPC Job Bank
-
HPC Systems Administrator
McGill University -
High Performance Computing Systems Administrator
Idaho National Laboratory -
Solution Engineer- HPC
Dell Inc -
Parallel Programmer
Cardiff University -
Principal Software Research Engineer
Indiana University -
Post Doctoral Researcher - Exascale Stream Computing
IBM - Visit the HPCwire Job Bank
Featured Events
-
July 13-16, 2009
WORLDCOMP'09
Las Vegas , NV
USA
-
August 24-28, 2009
Data Mining: Levels I, II, & III
Denver , CO
USA