July 30, 2010
PITTSBURGH, July 29 -- The National Science Foundation (NSF) has partially funded the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) to acquire a system that features SGI's newest scalable, shared-memory computing system and associated disks. The SGI Altix UV system features extremely large, coherent shared-memory and opens a new computational capability for US scientists and engineers.
The Altix UV system will have 4,096 cores, in 512 eight-core Intel Xeon (Nehalem) processors, with 32 terabytes of memory, organized as two connected 16-terabyte coherent shared-memory systems -- making these the largest coherent shared-memory systems in the world. Coherence, a feature related to the synchrony of read-write operations by different processors within the system, is an important feature in many large data-analysis tasks.
PSC will integrate the new system into the TeraGrid, the NSF program of comprehensive cyberinfrastructure, greatly increasing the capability available for U.S. science and engineering research.
"Because of the extraordinary memory size and relative ease of programming made possible by the Altix UV shared-memory structure, scientists and engineers will be able to solve problems that were heretofore intractable," said PSC scientific directors Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies in a joint statement. "For many research communities -- including data-analysis and many areas of computer science -- it will open the door to use of high-performance computation and thereby expand the abilities of scientists to ask and answer questions."
"PSC has a long-standing history of breakthrough scientific research through technology leadership and industry collaboration," said Mark Barrenechea, SGI CEO. "SGI is excited to partner with PSC, NSF and the TeraGrid alliance to enable the next generation of research with SGI's Altix UV shared memory super computer."
In computer terms, "shared memory" means that a system's memory can be directly accessed from all of its processors, as opposed to distributed memory (in which each processor's memory is directly accessed only by that processor). Because all processors share a single view of data, a shared memory system is relatively easy to program and use.
Because of its shared-memory design, the new PSC system will complement other NSF systems, most of which are based on distributed-memory architectures.
The 4,096 processor cores and 32 terabytes of shared memory are interconnected using SGI's next-generation high-bandwidth, low-latency NUMAlink 5 interconnect. This interconnect has specialized features that enable scalable shared-memory or message-passing applications to run with higher levels of parallel efficiency so that researchers can assign more processor cores simultaneously to the same task. This allows researchers to address larger problems and solve them more quickly.
Delivery of the new system is scheduled for the summer of 2010. Production use will begin in TeraGrid's Oct 2010 allocation cycle.
About PSC
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh together with Westinghouse Electric Company. Established in 1986, PSC is supported by several federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry, and is a resource provider in the National Science Foundation TeraGrid program.
About SGI
SGI (NASDAQ:SGI) is a global leader in large-scale clustered computing, high performance storage, HPC and data center enablement and services. SGI is focused on helping customers solve their most demanding business and technology challenges. Visit www.sgi.com for more information.
-----
Source: SGI
In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
Read more...
In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
Read more...
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...
May 23, 2013 |
he study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
Read more...
May 22, 2013 |
At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
Read more...
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...
May 10, 2013 |
Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.