HPCwire: Oak Ridge Supercomputer Wins Big at HPC Challenge

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

November 20, 2008

Oak Ridge Supercomputer Wins Big at HPC Challenge

'Jaguar' demonstrates its power and ease of use.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Nov. 20 -- A Cray XT5 supercomputer named Jaguar that runs scientific applications at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) placed in three out of four categories at the High-Performance Computing (HPC) Challenge awards, winning two "gold medals" and one "bronze" in this head-to-head competition. Results of the challenge, which measures excellence at handling computing workloads, were announced Nov. 18 in Austin at SC08, an international gathering of supercomputing professionals.

Jaguar won first place for both speed in solving a dense matrix of linear algebra equations (running a software code called High-Performance Linpack, or HPL) and sustainable memory bandwidth?or how many gigabytes per second a node can fetch and store (running the STREAM code). It won third place for speed in executing the Global-Fast Fourier Transformation, a common algorithm used in many scientific applications.

"The Cray Jaguar at ORNL winning two of the HPC Challenge benchmarks shows the power and potential of the computer system for handling some of the most challenging computational science problems," said Jack Dongarra of University of Tennessee-Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "It was able to produce an impressive 902 teraflops [trillion floating point operations per second] on HPL and 330 TB/s [terabytes per second] on STREAMS. Both results leave the second-place IBM Blue Gene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory far behind and demonstrates the balance between computing and communication bandwidth."

ORNL, along with Cray’s Chapel team led by Brad Chamberlain, shared another award for the most elegant implementation of the HPC Challenge benchmark applications in Cray's Chapel computer language.

John Levesque, director of the Cray Supercomputing Center of Excellence at ORNL, said the HPC Challenge, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency High Productivity Computing Systems Program, supports hardware and software development needed to effectively use petascale computers, which can execute quadrillions of calculations each second. Similar to the way a decathlon measures performance in ten track and field events, the HPC Challenge measures a computer's ability to excel in execution of a wide variety of components important to running scientific applications.

All of the benchmarks were run in two modes: baseline (no source-code modifications) and optimized (significant source-code modifications). Baselines demonstrate a machine's overall performance and ease of use, whereas optimizations boost performance on one specific aspect of computation. ORNL submitted baselines for Jaguar reflecting the ease of use of the system. In the list of the baseline results, Jaguar ranked as the most powerful machine in three of the four categories and ranked second in the final category, according to the posted results.

"The fact that Jaguar won these awards and placed so highly on the four major benchmarks with the baseline run attests to the superior performance and balance of the system," said Buddy Bland, project director for ORNL's Leadership Computing Facility, which hosts Jaguar. "This is truly a remarkable machine. It is exceptionally powerful in every measure that is important to the scientists who use this machine. Because it is a general-purpose computer that is easy to use, the scientists using this machine have been able to set new performance records on a wide range of science problems in just its first week of availability."

For more information about the HPC Challenge benchmarks, see http://www.hpcchallenge.org.

For more information on Jaguar, see http://www.nccs.gov/jaguar.

-----

Source: Dawn Levy, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

C-DAC announces plans for a petaflop system; IBM researchers are working on vertical integration techniques to extend Moore's Law another 15 years. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html