Argonnites Prep Mira Supercomputer for Petascale Duties

By Robert Gelber

August 1, 2012

Argonne National Laboratory is home to Mira, currently the third fastest system on TOP500 list. The 48-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer runs on 768,000 cores and cranks out more than 8 Linpack petaflops. While Mira is not fully operational yet, applications are already being optimized to run on the machine. Today, InformationWeek detailed a number of workloads the system is expected to handle.

Under the umbrella of Argonne’s Early Science Program, Mira will be assisting research in earthquake modeling, quantum mechanics, the effect of clouds on the climate, and materials science. These applications, along with others in the Early Science Program, should help researchers judge the system’s capabilities.

Mike Papka, the deputy associate director of the lab’s computing, environment and life sciences directorate, explained the how applications would be ramped on Mira. “A new architecture with a new system software stack, and at a scale that is larger than anyone else has run previously, results in a system that will have issues never seen before,” he said. “These issues need to be exposed and addressed before we go into production, and it often requires real users running real code on the system.”

Mira will be taking over for the Intrepid supercomputer, a Blue Gene/P machine. Back in 2008, the system took number four on the TOP500 at 458 Linpack teraflops. Intrepid was used for an “immediate need” project during the summer of 2010, when researchers ran simulations of oil rising through water, in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster.

Intrepid will stay online until Mira becomes fully operational, at which point the system will most likely get decommissioned. The laboratory cannot support the operational costs of both systems, so Intrepid may get sold to a university or simply get stripped down for parts.

According to the artice, 60 percent of Mira’s cycles will be allocated to the DOE’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. The project allows researchers from industry, government and academia to submit proposals to a panel. The panel then reviews the proposals, determining which applications display the most relevance to the program with computationally-ready software. 

The Advanced Science Computing Research Challenge accounts for another 30 percent of Mira’s computing time. This program works on issues aligned with the DOE’s energy priorities. Cycles related to the challenge will be allocated in June 2013.

The left over resources will be reserved for “immediate need” workloads like the Intrepid’s oil spill application. 

 

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

Watsonx Brings AI Visibility to Banking Systems

September 21, 2023

A new set of AI-based code conversion tools is available with IBM watsonx. Before introducing the new "watsonx," let's talk about the previous generation Watson, perhaps better known as "Jeopardy!-Watson." The origi Read more…

Researchers Advance Topological Superconductors for Quantum Computing

September 21, 2023

Quantum computers process information using quantum bits, or qubits, based on fragile, short-lived quantum mechanical states. To make qubits robust and tailor them for applications, researchers from the Department of Ene Read more…

Fortran: Still Compiling After All These Years

September 20, 2023

A recent article appearing in EDN (Electrical Design News) points out that on this day, September 20, 1954, the first Fortran program ran on a mainframe computer. Originally developed by IBM, Fortran (or FORmula TRANslat Read more…

Intel’s Gelsinger Lays Out Vision and Map at Innovation 2023 Conference

September 20, 2023

Intel’s sprawling, optimistic vision for the future was on full display yesterday in CEO Pat Gelsinger’s opening keynote at the Intel Innovation 2023 conference being held in San Jose. While technical details were sc Read more…

Intel Showcases “AI Everywhere” Strategy in MLPerf Inferencing v3.1

September 18, 2023

Intel used the latest MLPerf Inference (version 3.1) results as a platform to reinforce its developing “AI Everywhere” vision, which rests upon 4th gen Xeon CPUs and Gaudi2 (Habana) accelerators. Both fared well on t Read more…

AWS Solution Channel

Shutterstock 1679562793

How Maxar Builds Short Duration ‘Bursty’ HPC Workloads on AWS at Scale

Introduction

High performance computing (HPC) has been key to solving the most complex problems in every industry and has been steadily changing the way we work and live. Read more…

QCT Solution Channel

QCT and Intel Codeveloped QCT DevCloud Program to Jumpstart HPC and AI Development

Organizations and developers face a variety of issues in developing and testing HPC and AI applications. Challenges they face can range from simply having access to a wide variety of hardware, frameworks, and toolkits to time spent on installation, development, testing, and troubleshooting which can lead to increases in cost. Read more…

Survey: Majority of US Workers Are Already Using Generative AI Tools, But Company Policies Trail Behind

September 18, 2023

A new survey from the Conference Board indicates that More than half of US employees are already using generative AI tools, at least occasionally, to accomplish work-related tasks. Yet some three-quarters of companies st Read more…

Watsonx Brings AI Visibility to Banking Systems

September 21, 2023

A new set of AI-based code conversion tools is available with IBM watsonx. Before introducing the new "watsonx," let's talk about the previous generation Watson Read more…

Intel’s Gelsinger Lays Out Vision and Map at Innovation 2023 Conference

September 20, 2023

Intel’s sprawling, optimistic vision for the future was on full display yesterday in CEO Pat Gelsinger’s opening keynote at the Intel Innovation 2023 confer Read more…

Intel Showcases “AI Everywhere” Strategy in MLPerf Inferencing v3.1

September 18, 2023

Intel used the latest MLPerf Inference (version 3.1) results as a platform to reinforce its developing “AI Everywhere” vision, which rests upon 4th gen Xeon Read more…

China’s Quiet Journey into Exascale Computing

September 17, 2023

As reported in the South China Morning Post HPC pioneer Jack Dongarra mentioned the lack of benchmarks from recent HPC systems built by China. “It’s a we Read more…

Nvidia Releasing Open-Source Optimized Tensor RT-LLM Runtime with Commercial Foundational AI Models to Follow Later This Year

September 14, 2023

Nvidia's large-language models will become generally available later this year, the company confirmed. Organizations widely rely on Nvidia's graphics process Read more…

MLPerf Releases Latest Inference Results and New Storage Benchmark

September 13, 2023

MLCommons this week issued the results of its latest MLPerf Inference (v3.1) benchmark exercise. Nvidia was again the top performing accelerator, but Intel (Xeo Read more…

Need Some H100 GPUs? Nvidia is Listening

September 12, 2023

During a recent earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the world's richest man, summed up the shortage of Nvidia enterprise GPUs in a few sentences.  "We're us Read more…

Intel Getting Squeezed and Benefiting from Nvidia GPU Shortages

September 10, 2023

The shortage of Nvidia's GPUs has customers searching for scrap heap to kickstart makeshift AI projects, and Intel is benefitting from it. Customers seeking qui Read more…

CORNELL I-WAY DEMONSTRATION PITS PARASITE AGAINST VICTIM

October 6, 1995

Ithaca, NY --Visitors to this year's Supercomputing '95 (SC'95) conference will witness a life-and-death struggle between parasite and victim, using virtual Read more…

SGI POWERS VIRTUAL OPERATING ROOM USED IN SURGEON TRAINING

October 6, 1995

Surgery simulations to date have largely been created through the development of dedicated applications requiring considerable programming and computer graphi Read more…

U.S. Will Relax Export Restrictions on Supercomputers

October 6, 1995

New York, NY -- U.S. President Bill Clinton has announced that he will definitely relax restrictions on exports of high-performance computers, giving a boost Read more…

Dutch HPC Center Will Have 20 GFlop, 76-Node SP2 Online by 1996

October 6, 1995

Amsterdam, the Netherlands -- SARA, (Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum Amsterdam), Academic Computing Services of Amsterdam recently announced that it has pur Read more…

Cray Delivers J916 Compact Supercomputer to Solvay Chemical

October 6, 1995

Eagan, Minn. -- Cray Research Inc. has delivered a Cray J916 low-cost compact supercomputer and Cray's UniChem client/server computational chemistry software Read more…

NEC Laboratory Reviews First Year of Cooperative Projects

October 6, 1995

Sankt Augustin, Germany -- NEC C&C (Computers and Communication) Research Laboratory at the GMD Technopark has wrapped up its first year of operation. Read more…

Sun and Sybase Say SQL Server 11 Benchmarks at 4544.60 tpmC

October 6, 1995

Mountain View, Calif. -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Sybase, Inc. recently announced the first benchmark results for SQL Server 11. The result represents a n Read more…

New Study Says Parallel Processing Market Will Reach $14B in 1999

October 6, 1995

Mountain View, Calif. -- A study by the Palo Alto Management Group (PAMG) indicates the market for parallel processing systems will increase at more than 4 Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

CORNELL I-WAY DEMONSTRATION PITS PARASITE AGAINST VICTIM

October 6, 1995

Ithaca, NY --Visitors to this year's Supercomputing '95 (SC'95) conference will witness a life-and-death struggle between parasite and victim, using virtual Read more…

SGI POWERS VIRTUAL OPERATING ROOM USED IN SURGEON TRAINING

October 6, 1995

Surgery simulations to date have largely been created through the development of dedicated applications requiring considerable programming and computer graphi Read more…

U.S. Will Relax Export Restrictions on Supercomputers

October 6, 1995

New York, NY -- U.S. President Bill Clinton has announced that he will definitely relax restrictions on exports of high-performance computers, giving a boost Read more…

Dutch HPC Center Will Have 20 GFlop, 76-Node SP2 Online by 1996

October 6, 1995

Amsterdam, the Netherlands -- SARA, (Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum Amsterdam), Academic Computing Services of Amsterdam recently announced that it has pur Read more…

Cray Delivers J916 Compact Supercomputer to Solvay Chemical

October 6, 1995

Eagan, Minn. -- Cray Research Inc. has delivered a Cray J916 low-cost compact supercomputer and Cray's UniChem client/server computational chemistry software Read more…

NEC Laboratory Reviews First Year of Cooperative Projects

October 6, 1995

Sankt Augustin, Germany -- NEC C&C (Computers and Communication) Research Laboratory at the GMD Technopark has wrapped up its first year of operation. Read more…

Sun and Sybase Say SQL Server 11 Benchmarks at 4544.60 tpmC

October 6, 1995

Mountain View, Calif. -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Sybase, Inc. recently announced the first benchmark results for SQL Server 11. The result represents a n Read more…

New Study Says Parallel Processing Market Will Reach $14B in 1999

October 6, 1995

Mountain View, Calif. -- A study by the Palo Alto Management Group (PAMG) indicates the market for parallel processing systems will increase at more than 4 Read more…

ISC 2023 Booth Videos

Cornelis Networks @ ISC23
Dell Technologies @ ISC23
Intel @ ISC23
Lenovo @ ISC23
Microsoft @ ISC23
ISC23 Playlist
  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire