HPCwire: Oak Ridge Dives Into Science at the Petascale

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November 19, 2008

Oak Ridge Dives Into Science at the Petascale

by Leo Williams (Science Writer, ORNL), for HPCwire

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The petascale age is here. After years of predicting the scientific advancements they would be able to make with petaflop supercomputers capable of a thousand trillion calculations each second, researchers now have an opportunity to prove their point. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) recently unveiled the first petascale system dedicated to scientific research, a Cray XT machine with a theoretical peak performance of 1.64 petaflops.

This behemoth -- an upgrade to ORNL's Jaguar system -- comprises more than 45,000 quad-core AMD Opteron processors. It boasts an unprecedented 362 terabytes of memory, which is three times more than any other system, a 10-petabyte file system, 578 terabytes per second memory bandwidth, and input/output bandwidth of 284 gigabytes per second. We talked with Doug Kothe, director of science at ORNL's National Center for Computational Sciences [NCCS], about the challenges of and potential breakthroughs in science now possible with this built-for-science petascale system.

HPCwire: ORNL's upgraded Jaguar will be the first petascale supercomputer designed for and dedicated to open scientific research. What are the immediate plans for putting this system to use?

Doug Kothe: The current plan is for the system to be used during much of the coming year for specific high-impact projects of national importance. In addition, it will continue to support the INCITE program [Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program, sponsored by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) in the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science]. This first group is known as Transition to Operations, or T2O, projects. They are tackling science problems -- both applied and fundamental -- that cannot be solved without Jaguar's speed, memory, and infrastructure. We have been working closely with ASCR and with members of the computational science community to identify projects that have application software that can effectively utilize a large fraction of the system.

We expect these projects to deliver important results. Since they will be led by the community's most sophisticated users and prominent scientists, early simulations on Jaguar will also help us harden the system for a broader collection of projects later in the year.

The selection of science problems for early access to the petascale system is by no means finalized. Computational researchers who believe they can fully exploit this system to deliver far-reaching results should contact us via the Web. We have three principal goals during the system's early phase: deliver important, high-impact science results and advancements; harden the system for production; and embrace a broad user community capable of and prepared for using the system.

HPCwire: Will specific science domains have precedence?

Kothe: We are looking at all research areas that are important to DOE's mission, from energy assurance to climate-change science to more basic fundamental and applied science. The breadth and depth of critical science potentially solvable on this system are daunting, with domains including fusion, biology, atomic physics, chemistry, nuclear energy, materials and nanoscience, climate and geosciences, astrophysics, high-energy physics, turbulence, and combustion. And this is not an exhaustive list.

HPCwire: Can you give us some idea of the kind of results we can expect?

Kothe: Sure. Looking at climate studies, we hope to be able to say with increased confidence just how good global models will be at predicting regional climate change on the scale of decades. We should also be able to better predict the likelihood of abrupt climate change -- change taking place over decades rather than centuries -- and the potential for increasingly destructive storms around the world as the climate gets warmer.

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