HPCwire: NASA and SGI Join Petascale Fray

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

Leading HPC
Solution Providers

HPCwire >> Topic >> Systems

May 13, 2008

NASA and SGI Join Petascale Fray

by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor

SGI's entry into the multi-petaflops sweepstakes began last week with its announcement of the Space Act Agreement. The agreement outlines a multi-year partnership between SGI, Intel and NASA, with the goal of deploying petascale supercomputing capabilities for the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at the Ames Research Center. The three organizations will work together on a project called Pleiades to develop two systems: the first, a 2009 system with a capacity of one peak petaflop; the second, a ten petaflop system for 2012.

Pleiades refers to the constellation of the seven sisters, a cluster in the constellation of Taurus. The Pleiades metaphor applies not only to the likely cluster architecture of the new supercomputers, but also to the seven organizations involved in the project: the three development partners (SGI, Intel and NAS) and the four main mission directorates at NASA (Aeronautics, Exploration Systems, Science, and Space Operations) who will end up using the new systems.

NAS is tasked with a number of high profile computing projects, including space shuttle simulations, climate modeling and future space vehicle design. The future petascale capabilities are seen as the computational foundation of NASA's ongoing missions of space exploration and terrestrial research.

According to Dave Parry, senior VP and Product GM at SGI, the Space Act Agreement is a statement of intention, not a commitment to any specific system procurements. Any resulting contracts will be dependent upon NASA funding and mission priorities over the next four years, which, given the structural deficits in the federal budget and a new administration in 2009, are likely to evolve substantially over time.

The Pleiades collaboration between SGI and NASA is the result of a long-term relationship between the two organizations built over many years. The space agency was the first customer to deploy large SGI Origin SMP systems. Later, when SGI developed the shared-memory Itanium-based Altix machines, NASA became one of the early users of that technology. The current 88.9 teraflop Columbia supercomputer at the Ames center is a supercluster of two generations of Itanium-based Altix servers. The NAS division also owns a Xeon-based 43.5 teraflop Altix cluster, dubbed RTJones. On occasion, NAS has dabbled in IBM gear (a 4.8 teraflop Power5-based cluster, called Schirra), and systems from the now defunct Linux Networx, but the agency has remained unusually loyal to SGI for its major deployments.

"I see the Space Act Agreement not as a point-in-time event, but rather as part of the long-standing partnership that we have," Parry says.

But the two systems being envisioned under the agreement have very different development paths. The 2009 petaflop machine will likely be an evolution of SGI's NAS Technology Refresh supercomputer, also announced last week, and slated to be installed this summer. That system, a 20,480-core Altix ICE supercomputer, is designed to provide more than 240 teraflops of computing power. Parry says that the current ICE technology based on Intel Xeon processors "certainly provides expandability to systems up to and beyond a petaflop." With Intel's Nehalem processor technology and 40Gbps InfiniBand just around the corner, a one petaflop ICE cluster in 2009 should be within reach.

The ten petaflop system will be something else entirely. The conventional wisdom in the industry is that getting to multi-petaflop systems (and ultimately to exaflop systems) is going to require manycore processors, system architectures that are capable of scaling those processors, and integrated system software adept enough to effectively utilize all those resources. Parry notes that "a simple scaling of the socket and node count of the 240 teraflop system that we're installing would not lead you to a 10 petaflop system … that would be impractical from a physical perspective. Clearly, we will need to do something new."

Neither SGI nor any other HPC system vendor has commercial examples of such architectures. Cray and IBM are probably the furthest along the multi-petaflop path, thanks in part to support by DARPA, via the HPCS (High Productivity Computing Systems) program. SGI didn't make it past the first cut of HPCS, so the company's partnership with Intel and NASA should serve to bolster some of that lost R&D.

The partnership with Intel is particularly interesting, inasmuch as Cray just recently teamed up with the x86 chipmaker to collaborate on research and development of multi-petaflop systems for the same post-2010 timeframe. It is certainly conceivable that the SGI and Cray efforts could end up converging on the same manycore Intel processor architecture.

The fact that NASA is sticking with SGI gear points to the agency's desire to follow the path of least resistance to petaflops. The challenge for SGI and Intel is to deliver commercially-viable petascale supercomputing that can support NASA's HPC application software. That probably means a machine powered by x86, Itanium, or some combination of the two, and a software platform that makes the shift to manycore relatively painless.

"This is not going to be a stunt with a bunch of cell phone processors to get a high peak number," says Parry, "It is really about deploying relevant production-ready capability."

Article Tools

Share & Save Options

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

Complete Genomics Takes Off

Last week, San-Francisco-based Complete Genomics came out of stealth mode to become the first provider of large-scale human genome sequencing services. HPCwire recently asked company representatives a few questions about their new offering.
Read More...

Intel Grabs NetEffect Assets, Becomes iWARP Player

Intel has acquired the assets of NetEffect, an Austin-based company that makes iWARP-capable adapters. Intel will inherit NetEffect's product portfolio, which includes 1 and 10 GbE accelerated adapters, 10 GbE adapters for blade configurations as well as a 10 GbE ASIC.
Read More...

Woven Launches New 10 GbE Switch

Woven Systems has added a new 10 Gigabit Ethernet top-of-rack switch to its product lineup. The TRX 200 is aimed at high performance datacenter environments requiring a scalable Ethernet fabric.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Hazy Computing

Oct 15 | Linux Magazine | Today machines manage what we cannot. Are we dependent upon results or processes we do not understand? Read more...

Reaching For the Exa-Scale

Oct 15 | International Science Grid This Week | Exa-scale computing is probably years away. But GPUs and volunteer grids may provide a shortcut. Read more...

New Visualization Laboratory Debuts on UT Austin's Main Campus

Oct 14 | Texas Advanced Computing Center | TACC has unveiled a new visualization laboratory capable of reproducing terascale data sets with exceptional clarity and resolution. Read more...

High-Performance Nonsense

Oct 13 | Computerworld | Microsoft will have to overcome Windows' historical baggage if its new HPC Server 2008 offering is to be acceptable to users. Read more...

ORNL's Breakthroughs in Cray Machines Make it Hard to Beat

Oct 13 | Knoxville News Sentinel | Oak Ridge National Laboratory has petaflop computing in sight as it upgrades its 'Jaguar' supercomputer. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Panasas® Tiered Parity™ Architecture

Sep 04 | | Disk drives are approximately 250 times denser today than a decade ago. This is good news for users who are creating, manipulating and storing more data than ever before. It gives them an opportunity to derive more value from their stored data and lowers the capital acquisition and operating expense associated with that data.

SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server for High Performance Computing

Sep 05 | | The excellent scalability features of Linux, in addition to robust security and performance makes it an excellent choice for server systems, especially in the high performance computing area.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

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.