September 29, 2011
September 29 -- Like China and Japan, Russia intends to build an exascale supercomputer in 2020. A possibility of being there on time has been preliminarily estimated at around $1,5 bln by the local experts.
Russian specialists have prepared a concept of exascale technology development in the country in 2012-2020. This was reported by the document authors at a recent meeting of Russia`s National HPC Technology Platform that CNews has attended.
The group of the document authors consists of experts from the Russian state nuclear corporation - Rosatom, institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences and some leading local universities. The workgroup was formed for concept preparation by the interdepartmental group for supercomputing development in Russia, headed by Rosatom CEO Sergey Kirienko.
At the moment the document is being updated with suggestions by the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communication who wants to add GRID networks to the concept, the Ministry representatives said to CNews. After the update, the concept will be shown for approval to one of the Russia`s presidential units this October, said one of the workgroup members.
The document has been in work for over half a year by now. The concept authors marked it implies stage-by-stage construction of an exascale super, as well as development of a special processor for exascale computing, HPC platforms, system and applied software.
The exascale machine is not to be an all-purpose computing instrument, they also say, but intended for only a number of narrow compute jobs in some strategically important sectors, such as defense and oil&gas industry.
This year the Federal Nuclear Center located in the Russian city of Sarov, which is part of Rosatom corporation, announced launch of the first petascale system in the country built by its own engineers. Due to the organization`s high secrecy level this supercomputer has not been applied to any HPC ratings. According to the workgroup members, in 2014-2015 it is planned to build a system with performance of upto 10-15 Pflops, in 2017-2018 – to 100 Pflops, and in 2012 try build an exascale computer. It is not, however, specified yet, if it is all going to be extentions onto Rosatom`s initial cluster or different systems.
A source close to the concept workgroup said to CNews the preliminary budget of the project is estimated at around 45 billion rubles (nearly $1,5 bln by the current exchange rate). Another source, familiar with the document, has confirmed the amount is around that. However, after the concept is updated and approved by the state units, the final budget might change, he says, suggesting the amount could exceed 55 billion rubles (nearly $1,8 bln by the current exchange rate).
The same source also says the concept proposes certain project contractors. Fundamental research is supposed to go to academic organizations while the hardware part – to Rosatom and T-Platforms. The latter, says CNews source, could participate in the system architecture development and be involved in the microelectronics works.
It stands to remind that the most powerful supercomputer in Russia, according to the local Top-50 list, now has performance of 1,3 Pflops and is installed in Lomonosov Moscow State University.
------
Source: CNews
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...
The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
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...
May 09, 2013 |
The Japanese government has revealed its plans to best its previous K Computer efforts with what they hope will be the first exascale system...
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.