HPCwire: ORNL Closes In On Petascale Computing

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July 13, 2007

ORNL Closes In On Petascale Computing

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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?

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