Hasta La Gadget!

IBM has been producing some of the best performing supercomputers in the world for a number of years. In fact, back in 2008 and 2009 IBM developed and launched a supercomputer called Roadrunner. This supercomputer was the first to be able to operate at sustained performance in the petaflop range.

The computer was installed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory where it has been in use for the last five years. Yesterday, the laboratory officially decommissioned Roadrunner. The supercomputer has 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i processors and 6480 AMD Opteron dual-core processors.

Those processors shared 114 TB of memory and about 1.09 million TB of storage. The supercomputer isn’t being completely dismantled, researchers will continue to utilize the machine and its impressive power for various experiments. These experiments will include things such as determining the methods for compressing operating system memory and optimizing data routing.

With Roadrunner being decommissioned from research duties, scientists and other researchers can now use the computer for projects that couldn’t have been done while the supercomputer was being used for research projects. The computer is housed in 6000 ft.² of space and cost $125 million to build. Roadrunner may not be fast enough for the scientists and researchers at Los Alamos, but the computer is still incredibly fast and sits at number 22 on the list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The computer gulps power needing 2345 kW when running full tilt. Modern supercomputers need significantly less power to achieve significantly more performance.

[via PCMag]

World’s first petaflop supercomputer gets decommissioned is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Things got a tad hairy for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Blue Waters supercomputer when IBM halted work on it in 2011, but with funding from the National Science Foundation, the one-petaflop system is now crunching numbers 24/7. The behemoth resides within the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and is composed of 237 Cray XE6 cabinets and 32 of the XK7 variety. NVIDIA GK110 Kepler GPU accelerators line the inside of the machine and are flanked by 22,640 compute nodes, which each pack two AMD 6276 Interlagos processors clocked at 2.3 GHz or higher. At its peak performance, the rig can churn out 11.61 quadrillion calculations per second. According to the NCSA, all that horsepower earns Blue Waters the title of the most powerful supercomputer on a university campus. Now that it’s cranking away around-the-clock, it’ll be used in projects investigating everything from how viruses infect cells to weather predictions.

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Source: National Center for Supercomputing Applications

While mad game show skills are nice and all, IBM has started to nudge Watson toward the door to begin paying its own freight. After a recent foray into finance, the publicity-loving supercomputer has now brought its number-crunching prowess to the pharmaceutical and pastry industries, according to the New York Times. If the latter sounds like a stretch for a hunk of silicon, it actually isn’t: researchers trained Watson with food chemistry data, flavor popularity studies and 20,000 recipes — all of which will culminate in a tasting of the bot’s freshly devised “Spanish Crescent” recipe. Watson was also put to work at GlaxoSmithKline, where it came up with 15 potential compounds as possible anti-malarial drugs after being fed all known literature and data on the disease. So far, Watson projects haven’t made Big Blue much cash, but the company hopes that similar AI ventures might see its prodigal child finally pay back all those years of training.

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Source: New York Times

The world obviously needs its supercomputers, but with a growing energy crisis, efficiency is becoming a big priority. The problem is that supercomputers require a lot of power, but that’s an issue Eurotech and NVIDIA are trying to solve in the new Eurora computer. Not only is this beast powerful, but NVIDIA has announced that it’s also breaking efficiency records for supercomputers.

In a NVIDIA Blog post, the company explains that Eurora managed to reach “3,150 megaflops per watt of sustained performance,” which just so happens to beat the efficiency of the highest-ranked supercomputer on the Green500 list by 26%. That isn’t bad at all, and it’s thanks to Eurotech’s Aurora hot water cooling system.

By using hot water cooling, the Eurora doesn’t need to be cooled by air conditioning, obviously saving on energy costs. NVIDIA describes the benefit of using hot water by pointing out that it can be “re-purposed to heat buildings or drive absorption chillers, and then returned back to the supercomputer at a cooler temperature.” The Eurora is equipped with 64 compute nodes, which are each made up of two Intel Xeon E5-series CPUs and two NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU accelerators. Since the water cooling system allows Eurotech to save space in the Eurora, NVIDIA says it’s able to fit 256 CPUs and GPUs into a single rack.

While the water cooling system helped the Eurora meet its efficiency goals, it didn’t do all the work along. The Telsa K20 GPUs are also quite efficient too, with NVIDIA pointing out that they’re four times more efficient than x86 CPUs. The Eurora made its way to the Cineca supercomputer facility in Bologna, Italy this week, with NVIDIA and Eurotech predicting that it will save 2.5 million kilowatt hours and eliminate 1,500 tons of CO2 emissions over the course of its 5-year life. That, ladies and gentlemen, is one efficient machine.

Eurora supercomputer cuts back on CO2 emissions with help of NVIDIA GPUs is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

In short order, the Sequoia supercomputer and its 1.57 million processing cores will transition to a life of top-secret analysis at the National Nuclear Security Administration, but until that day comes, researchers are currently working to ensure its seamless operation. Most recently, a team from Stanford took the helm of Sequoia to run computational fluid dynamics simulations — a process that requires a finely tuned balance of computation, memory and communication components — in order to better understand engine noise from supersonic jets. As an encouraging sign, the team was able to successfully push the CFD simulation beyond 1 million cores, which is a first of its kind and bodes very well for the scalability of the system. This and other tests are currently being performed on Sequoia as part of its “shakeout” period, which allows its caretakers to better understand the capabilities of the IBM BlueGene/Q computer. Should all go well, Sequoia is scheduled to begin a life of government work in March. In the meantime, you’ll find a couple views of the setup after the break.

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Via: TechCrunch, EurekAlert

Source: Stanford