HPCwire: The Search for Stable Storage

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

HPCwire >> Special Features >> SC08 >> SC08 Features

November 19, 2008

The Search for Stable Storage

by Leo Williams, Science Writer, ORNL

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

A team led by Thomas Schulthess of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has broken the petaflop barrier with a supercomputing application likely to accelerate the revolution in magnetic storage.

Using ORNL's upgraded Cray XT Jaguar supercomputer, the team was able to achieve a sustained performance of 1.05 quadrillion calculations a second, or 1.05 petaflops, for an application that simulates the behavior of electron systems. Jaguar itself was recently upgraded to a peak performance of 1.64 petaflops, making it the world's first petaflop system dedicated to open scientific research. The team's simulation ran on nearly 150,000 of Jaguar's 180,000-plus processing cores.

Among its benefits, the application promises to advance scientific understanding of magnetic devices such as computer hard drives. In the last couple of decades, hard drive storage capacity has grown at an extraordinary rate. The associated risk, though, is that with increasing storage density, these amazing devices tend to become less stable.

Hard drives hold information by magnetizing tiny regions of a platter, with regions magnetized in one direction counting as ones and in the opposite direction as zeroes. With the exponential growth of storage capacity, these miniscule spots have gotten progressively even smaller; and the smaller the spot, the more likely its magnetic direction is to be incorrectly and unexpectedly reversed. Since disorder at the atomic scale increases with temperature, a hard drive kept as warm as room temperature becomes increasingly susceptible to random changes -- meaning lost data -- as storage density rises.

"A big problem in magnetic recording is that as you make the bits smaller and smaller, thermal excitation will essentially randomize them and you will lose information," explained Markus Eisenbach of ORNL. "If that happens in 500 years you don't care, but if it happens tomorrow you're really unhappy."

The team's current approach differs fundamentally from earlier efforts because it is able to set aside empirical models and their attendant approximations to tackle the system through first-principles calculations. Eisenbach, who serves as the team's developer for the project, noted that this empirical approach was far too computationally intensive for earlier computer systems.

"It's the new Jaguar coming on line that makes it really feasible," he said. "If you have a classical Heisenberg model, an energy calculation takes perhaps milliseconds. For this first-principles calculation, an energy calculation takes tens of seconds. So it's orders of magnitude slower. You really need a computer of that size."

The team simulates the effect of heat on a magnetic material by combining two methods. The first -- known as locally self-consistent multiple scattering, or LSMS -- describes the journeys of scattered electrons by applying density functional theory to solve the Dirac equation, a relativistic wave equation for electron behavior. The code has a robust history, having been the first code to run at a sustained trillion calculations per second and earned its developers the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize in 1998.

The shortcoming of this approach, though, is that it is used primarily to describe a system in its ground state at a temperature of absolute zero, or nearly 460°F. In order to include the energy brought to the system by temperatures outside a laboratory freezer, the team's simulations incorporate a Monte Carlo method known as Wang-Landau, which guides the LSMS application to explore electron behavior at a variety of temperatures.

According to Eisenbach, the two methods are ideally suited to massively parallel computing systems. They scale linearly, meaning the need for computing resources grows at the same rate as the size of the system being simulated, and LSMS can be scaled to very large materials systems by assigning one atom to each processing core.

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

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

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...

Tailoring Medicine with Supercomputers

Mar 16 | Bio-IT World | Biotech firm builds genetic models from patient data. 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