The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
June 23, 2006
NNSA Announces Record Performance on IBM Blue Gene/L
The Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and IBM teamed up to announce that a new mark was achieved on the world's fastest supercomputer named Blue Gene/L (BG/L). This world record for a scientific application was set by achieving a sustained performance of 207.3 teraflops on the "Qbox" computer code for conducting materials science simulations critical to national security.
BG/L is an IBM supercomputer housed at NNSA's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and is ranked as the world's fastest supercomputer. It is used to conduct materials science simulations for NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program, which unites the scientific computing know-how of NNSA's Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories. The computer simulation capabilities developed by the ASC program provide the nuclear weapons analysis that NNSA needs to keep the nuclear weapons stockpile safe, secure and reliable without underground nuclear testing.
"This is an important step on the path to performing predictive simulations of nuclear weapons, and these simulations are vital to ensuring the safety and reliability of our nuclear weapons stockpile. These results further confirm that Blue Gene/L's architecture can scale with real-world applications. The performance of the Qbox code was made possible by the partnership with our IBM collaborators, who helped to optimize the code's performance on BG/L's 131,072 processors," said Dimitri Kusnezov, head of NNSA's ASC Program.
The performance improvement over previous efforts was due in large measure to new mathematical libraries developed by software researchers at IBM that take best advantage of BG/L's dual-core architecture.
"Results of this magnitude and importance simply cannot be achieved by a single person or party alone," said David Turek, vice president of Deep Computing at IBM. "Only through collaborative innovation such as through our partnership with the National Nuclear Security Administration and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory can the boundaries of computing be pushed as far as they've been today. We will continue to work together, pushing the boundaries of insight and invention to advance our shared mission in ways never before possible."
Qbox is a first-principles molecular dynamics (FPMD) code, designed to predict the properties of metals under extreme conditions of temperature and pressure -- a longstanding goal for researchers in materials science and high energy-density physics. FPMD codes are used for complex simulations at the atomic level in a number of scientific areas, including metallurgy, solid-state physics, chemistry, biology and nanotechnology.
The "Q" in Qbox is for "quantum," a reference to the quantum mechanical descriptions of electrons that are the principal focus of this type of simulation code. The ability to accurately model changes to the electronic structure of atoms distinguishes FPMD codes from classical molecular dynamics codes.
The three-dimensional code run, studying how molybdenum (a transition metal) atoms behave under pressure, represents one of only a handful of "predictive science" simulations achieving this size: 1,000 molybdenum atoms. While classical molecular dynamics calculations are frequently run with billions of atoms because the interactions between the atoms are relatively easily computed, routine quantum runs, which are both very complex and accurate, have been restricted to around 50 atoms until now. The difference between 50 and a 1000 makes the difference between being able to explore new classes of chemical systems using first-principles methods, including heterogeneous environments (considering interactions between unlike molecules) and extreme chemistry (including shocks). Such a step is important to NNSA's stockpile stewardship program, and also has important implications for biological systems, including the study of proteins.
Predictive simulations allow researchers to understand how complex physical, chemical and biological systems behave over time, where it was previously only possible to get brief snapshots at a smaller scale. This capability to do predictive science is important to NNSA's national security mission, as its researchers try to understand how the materials in nuclear weapons age, particularly for those warheads that have aged beyond their intended life. Furthermore, the performance of the Qbox code, specially designed to run on large-scale platforms such as BG/L, has implications for the broader research community and will likely enable the development of new materials of interest to many industries.
"The combination of this code and this computer, both products of a partnership between ASC and IBM, has implications for the broad research community well beyond NNSA's mission of stockpile science. Such spin-off benefits often accompany focused programmatic efforts to foster technology. This was certainly true for NASA during the years of the moon landing and is true today," said Kusnezov. "Disruptive advanced architecture work for ASC leads to low-cost, but highly useful computers that benefit the nation well beyond national security."
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
Feature Articles
Spider Up and Spinning Connections to All Computing Platforms at ORNL
Spider, the world's biggest Lustre-based, centerwide file system, has been fully tested to support Oak Ridge National Laboratory's new petascale Cray XT4/XT5 Jaguar supercomputer and is now offering early access to scientists.
Read More...
Wolfram Alpha: A Web-Based Application That Embraced Supercomputers
Wolfram Alpha, the Web-based computational engine introduced in May, is not a traditional supercomputing application, but relies on supercomputers to satisfy its unique requirements.
Read More...
TeraGrid '09: Student Participation Soars
There was a new energy at this year's TeraGrid '09 conference thanks to an outstanding turnout for the student program. Thanks to support from the National Science Foundation, more than 100 high school, undergraduate and graduate students were able to participate in the conference.
Read More...
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