HPCwire: OLCF Gets New Super to Challenge APT Group

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February 09, 2012

OLCF Gets New Super to Challenge APT Group

Researchers using the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF’s) resources can foresee substantial changes in their scientific application code development in the near future.

The OLCF’s new supercomputer, a Cray XK6 named Titan with an expected peak speed of 10–20 petaflops (10–20 thousand trillion calculations per second), will use a hybrid architecture of conventional, multipurpose central processing units (CPUs) and high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) which, until recently, primarily drove modern video game graphics. Titan is set to be operational by early 2013. The machine will supplant the OLCF’s current fastest supercomputer, Jaguar, a Cray XT5 using an entirely CPU-based platform.

With Titan’s arrival, fundamental changes to computer architectures will challenge researchers from every scientific discipline. Members of the OLCF’s Application Performance Tools (APT) group understand the challenge. Their goal is to make the transition as smooth as possible.

“The effort necessary to glean insight from large-scale computation is already considerable for scientists,” computational astrophysicist Bronson Messer said. “Anything that tool developers can do to reduce the burden of porting codes to new architectures, while ensuring performance and correctness, allows us to spend more time obtaining scientific results from simulations.”

The APT group is working to ensure that researchers receiving allocations on leadership-class computing resources will not have to spend huge amounts of time learning how to effectively use their codes as the OLCF shifts to hybrid computing architectures.

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