NASA's Pleiades Supercomputer Ranks Among World's Fastest

Rachel Hoover/Jill Dunbar

Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

 

WASHINGTON -- NASA's largest supercomputer is seventh on the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful, high-performance computers. The announcement was made at the 26th International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany.

Pleiades, located at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., supports more than 1,000 active users around the country who are advancing our knowledge about the Earth, solar system and the universe. Pleiades is used to meet the computing needs on NASA's most demanding modeling and simulation projects in aeronautics; Earth and space science; exploration systems and technologies; and future space operations.

"We're really excited that Pleiades delivered nearly 83 percent of the theoretical peak performance," said Rupak Biswas, chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames. "This means our science and engineering users get extremely efficient use of their computing time on the system. Reaching the sustained petaflop per second rate is a significant milestone for NASA and its industry partners."

Since last June, the NAS Division has implemented a series of expansions to the system's performance capabilities. The team recently added 14 new SGI(R) Altix(R) ICE 8400 systems so that Pleiades now contains 23,296 Intel(R) Xeon(R) quad- and hex-core processors (111,104 cores in 182 racks) that can run at a theoretical peak of approximately 1.32 quadrillion floating point operations, or calculations, per second. It achieved an official sustained rate of 1.09 petaflop per second using the LINPACK benchmark, the industry standard for measuring a system's floating point computing power.

Pleiades runs on three generations of Intel-based processors with varying memory per core across two generations of InfiniBand(R) technology. The latest hex-core Intel(R) Xeon(R) 5600 (Westmere) and earlier quad-core 5570 (Nehalem) processors run at a speed of 2.93 GHz, while the original Pleiades 5400 (Harpertown) quad-core processors run at 3 GHz.

Since its installation in 2008, scientists have run large-scale jobs on Pleiades to gain insight into Earth's ocean and climate variability; reduce harmful emissions from aircraft; and design future vehicles for planetary and space exploration. The system also has been critical to supporting debris damage assessment on space shuttle missions and gave managers data about critical decisions to perform repairs and clear the orbiter for safe landing.

The NAS facility continues to feature the world's largest InfiniBand(R) interconnect network with 11,648 nodes and more than 63 miles of cabling -- long enough to reach the "frontier of space" from the surface of Earth. The double data rate, quad data rate and hybrid cables interconnect Pleiades' nodes with mass data storage systems and the hyperwall-2 visualization system. This allows scientists to concurrently view and analyze their data while their computational jobs run, often leading to the discovery of previously unknown details in their ultra-large datasets.

For more information about the Pleiades supercomputer, visit http://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/resources/pleiades.html.

For information about the TOP500 list, visit http://www.top500.org/.

For information about NASA and agency programs, visit http://www.nasa.gov.

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Japan Creates World's Fastest Supercomputer

When it comes to the most powerful supercomputers in the world, I don't think it is to anybody's great surprise that the most powerful one is located in Japan. This new Japanese supercomputer has just recently earned the top spot among all the supercomputers in the world with a performance that makes other supercomputers look like a TI-82.

Known as the "K Computer", this device is three times faster than its closest rival from China, which previously held the number one spot, according to Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University Tennessee at Knoxville Jack Dongarra. Dongarra also keeps the official rankings of computer performance.

The K Computer, which was created by Fujitsu and is located at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, represents an incredible step forward in the realm of speed. This computer will also, more than likely, become a great sense of national pride for Japan, especially for computer scientists, who take the race to have the fastest computer in the world very seriously.

According to Dongarra, "It's a very impressive machine. It's a lot more powerful than the other computers." The latest ranking of the top 500 computers is determined with a simple mathematical equation. The computer who gets to take the top spot is able to make 8.2 quadrillion calculations per second which also calculates to 8.2 petaflops per second. The performance of the K Computer is the same as linking around 1 million desktops.

Supercomputers have many uses including earthquake simulations, climate modeling, nuclear research and weapons development and testing. Businesses also use supercomputers for oil exploration as well as rapid stock trading. However, building a supercomputer isn't cheap and it usually involves connecting thousands of small computers in a data center.

The K Computer is made up of 672 cabinets filled with system boards. The K Computer is considered to be energy-efficient even though it uses enough electricity to power around 10,000 homes at an estimated cost of $10 million annually. I'd hate to see the statistics for the non-energy-efficient ones. The lab that the K Computer calls home is planning on increasing the size of the computer to 800 cabinets which is predicted to raise the speed of the supercomputer that is already faster then its five closest competitors.

The K Computer received its name from the Japanese word "Kei" which translates to 10 quadrillion, the overall goal for the number of calculations the supercomputer should be able to perform. The previously leading supercomputer was China's Tianhe-1A which was located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China. The Tianhe-1A was the first Chinese supercomputer to hit the top spot which acted as a beacon of the country's growing technological prowess.

The fastest supercomputer in the United States is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It placed third behind the K Computer and the Tianhe-1A. Countries in Asia have made sizable investments in supercomputing and currently dominate the upper echelon of the field. Japan and China alone hold four out of the top five spots.

However, when it comes to the top 10, the United States is still the leader, holding five of the top 10 spots. Japan's top supercomputer ranking marks the country's first since 2004. The United States and China were previously the only countries to hold that title. These rankings, issued every six months, are frequently changed and reflect just how fast computer power is advancing.

Source: The New York Times - Japanese 'K' Computer Is Ranked Most Powerful

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Breakthrough by IBM May Bring Us Exascale Supercomputers

If you are one of the people out there that doesn't think that a supercomputer seems good enough, then you probably work at IBM. Researchers at IBM have just made a breakthrough in using light pulses to help accelerate the transfer of data between chips. If this works out like the people at IBM think it will, then it could quite possibly increase supercomputer performance by more than a thousand times.

This technology, dubbed CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics (I feel smarter already), integrates optical modules as well as electrical modules on a single piece of silicon. This allows electrical signals created at the transistor level to be transformed into light pulses, seemingly allowing chips to communicate faster according to IBM silicon photonics research scientist Will Green.

IBM believes that this new technology will lead to massive advances in supercomputer power. The fastest supercomputers we have around today max out at nearly 2 petaflops which, for us lay people, registers into two thousand trillion calculations per second. The photonics technology could increase this number to a staggering trillion million calculations per second. Yeah, a MILLION TRILLION calculations per second, otherwise known as an exaflop. This would help IBM achieve their goal of building an exascale computer by the year 2020.

According to Green, "In an exascale system, interconnects have to be able to push exabytes per second across the network. This is an interesting milestone for system builders who are looking at building exascale systems in 10 years."

The possibility of integrating multiple photonics modules onto a single substrate or onto a motherboard is here, according to Green. Newer supercomputers already use optical technology for chips in order to communicate. However, this usually occurs at the rack level and mostly over a single wavelength. This breakthrough will allow optical communication simultaneously at multiple wavelengths.

The good thing about this technology is that it can be manufactured on a standard chip production line. Another benefit is that it also needs no special tools, making it extremely cost-effective. The current demonstration used a 130-nanometer CMOS manufacturing node. However, IBM plans on pursuing integration into "deeply scaled sub-100 nanometer CMOS processes," according to Green.

The technology aims to replace copper wires. As you know, copper wires are widely used today for data transfer between chips. Optics can get a speed increase for distances as short as a few centimeters to as long as a few miles and even consumes less power. Eventually, IBM hopes to use optics for on-chip communication between transistors as well. According to Green, "There is a vision for the chip level, but that is not what we are claiming today."

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