IBM Sequoia používaný Národním institutem Lawrence Livermora v Kalifornii je nejrychlejším superpočítačem na světě. Vyplývá to z žebříčku zveřejněného na konferenci ISC’12 v Hamburku. Sequoia používá mikroprocesorovou architekturu POWER, která se běžně využívá také v komerčních podnikových systémech. (TZ)
Nejrychlejším evropským superpočítačem je další stroj IBM – SuperMUC z Leibnizova výpočetního centra (Leibniz-Rechenzentrum) v Mnichově. Ten je navíc prvním komerčně dostupným superpočítačem chlazeným horkou vodou.
Počítač Sequoia dokáže procesovat úlohy rychlostí 16 petaflops. Pro srovnání – systém dosahující rychlosti 10 petaflops dokáže spustit simulaci reakce lidského srdce na nový lék do dvou dnů. Systému o výkonu jeden petaflop by stejný výpočet trval dva roky. Systém o výkonu 16 petaflops dokáže nabídnout například čtyřicetinásobné zlepšení při předvídání zemětřesení.
SuperMUC je postaven na serverech IBM System x iDataPlex Direct Water Cooled dx360 s více než 150 000 jádry a je schopný dosáhnout výkonu tří petaflops. To odpovídá výkonu 110 000 osobních počítačů. Díky unikátnímu systému chlazení je systém i přes svůj vysoký výkon o 40 % efektivnější než srovnatelné systémy chlazené vzduchem. SuperMUC tak ušetří Leibnizovu výpočetnímu centru jeden milion eur ročně jen za náklady na energie.
Kromě toho, že se superpočítače neustále zrychlují a zmenšují, jsou také dostupnější. Například Sequoia představuje pro firmu nebo univerzitu příležitost pořídit petaflopsový počítač o velikosti pěti racků. Japonský superpočítač K Computer, který byl dříve v TOP500 jedničkou, by k výkonu pouhého jednoho petaflopu potřeboval celých 80 racků.
NNSA’s Sequoia Supercomputer Ranked as World’s Fastest
Supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab passes 16 petaflops
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced that a supercomputer called Sequoia at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) was ranked the world’s most powerful computing system.
Clocking in at 16.32 sustained petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second), Sequoia earned the number one ranking on the industry standard Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers released Monday, June 18, at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC12) in Hamburg, Germany. Sequoia was built for NNSA by IBM.
A 96-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q system, Sequoia will enable simulations that explore phenomena at a level of detail never before possible. Sequoia is dedicated to NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program for stewardship of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, a joint effort from LLNL, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories.
“Computing platforms like Sequoia help the United States keep its nuclear stockpile safe, secure, and effective without the need for underground testing,” said NNSA Administrator Thomas D’Agostino. “While Sequoia may be the fastest, the underlying computing capabilities it provides give us increased confidence in the nation’s nuclear deterrent as the weapons stockpile changes under treaty agreements, a critical part of President Obama’s nuclear security agenda. Sequoia also represents continued American leadership in high performance computing, key to the technology innovation that drives high-quality jobs and economic prosperity.”
“Sequoia will provide a more complete understanding of weapons performance, notably hydrodynamics and properties of materials at extreme pressures and temperatures. In particular, the system will enable suites of highly resolved uncertainty quantification calculations to support the effort to extend the life of aging weapons systems; what we call a life extension program (LEP),” said Bob Meisner, NNSA director of the ASC program.
Uncertainty quantification, or “UQ,” is the quantitative characterization and reduction of uncertainty in computer applications through running very large suites of calculations to characterize the effects of minor differences in the systems. Sources of uncertainty are rife in the natural sciences and engineering. UQ uses statistical methods to determine likely outcomes.
The machine will be an important tool used to support stockpile life extension programs, including the B61 and the W78. By reducing the time required for these studies, total costs are also reduced. In addition, the machine is expected to enhance NNSA’s ability to sustain the stockpile by resolving any significant findings in weapons systems, bringing greater power to the annual assessment of the stockpile, and anticipating and avoiding future problems that inevitably result from aging. All of this helps to ensure that the nation will never have to return to nuclear testing.
Supercomputers such as Sequoia have allowed the U.S. to have confidence in its nuclear weapons stockpile over the 20 years since nuclear testing ended in 1992. The insight that comes from supercomputing simulations is also vital to addressing nonproliferation and counterterrorism issues as well as informing other national security decisions such as nuclear weapon policy and treaty agreements.
“Sequoia is an exciting achievement for the POWER architecture, not just for its speed and energy efficiency, but also for the important and complex work it can support to safeguard the nation’s nuclear stockpile,” said Colin Parris, General Manager IBM Power Systems. “With supercomputers capable of 16 sustained petaflops, our ability to affect strategic change in areas like life sciences, public safety, energy and transportation that make our world smarter is greater than ever. The improvements in affordability, performance, efficiency and size that Sequoia delivers will also enable a broader set of commercial customers to implement HPC for their competitive advantage.”
The NNSA/LLNL/IBM partnership has produced six HPC systems that have been ranked among the world’s most powerful computers including: The Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) Blue Pacific; ASCI White; the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Purple; Blue Gene/L; Blue Gene/P; and Blue Gene/Q, Sequoia. ASCI White, Blue Gene/L and now Sequoia all attained a number one ranking on the Top500 list.
Sequoia is primarily water cooled and consists of 96 racks; 98,304 compute nodes; 1.6 million cores; and 1.6 petabytes of memory. Though orders of magnitude more powerful than such predecessor systems as ASC Purple and Blue Gene/L, Sequoia will be roughly 90 times more power efficient than Purple and about eight times more than BG/L relative to the peak speeds of these systems.
These videos explain a little more about how NNSA uses supercomputers to maintain the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile without the need for underground testing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqOmBB5E_r8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj4MjUA_G5I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZEOsNbkbsU
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Established by Congress in 2000, NNSA is a semi-autonomous agency within the U.S. Department of Energy responsible for enhancing national security through the military application of nuclear science. NNSA maintains and enhances the safety, security, reliability and performance of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile without nuclear testing; works to reduce global danger from weapons of mass destruction; provides the U.S. Navy with safe and effective nuclear propulsion; and responds to nuclear and radiological emergencies in the U.S. and abroad. Visit www.nnsa.energy.gov for more information.
First Commercial IBM Hot-Water Cooled Supercomputer to Consume 40% Less Energy
Leibniz’s „SuperMUC“ named Europe’s fastest supercomputer
MUNICH, Germany, June 18, 2012 — The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), in collaboration with IBM, today announced the world’s first commercially available hot-water cooled supercomputer, a powerful, high-performance system designed to help researchers and industrial institutions across Europe investigate and solve some of the world’s most daunting scientific challenges.
YouTube: http://youtu.be/LzTedSh51Tw
Flickr Photos:(hidden): http://flickr.com/gp/ibm_research_zurich/m89ZD2/
Timeline: IBM’s History and Future in Water Cooled Computing (1966-2060)
The new LRZ „SuperMUC“ system was built with IBM System x iDataPlex Direct Water Cooled dx360 M4 servers with more than 150,000 cores to provide a peak performance of up to three petaflops, which is equivalent to the work of more than 110,000 personal computers. Put another way, three billion people using a pocket calculator would have to perform one million operations per second each to reach equivalent SuperMUC performance. Also, a revolutionary new form of hot-water cooling technology invented by IBM allows the system to be built 10 times more compact and substantially improve its peak performance while consuming 40 percent less energy than a comparable air-cooled machine.
“This year all the electricity consumed by state-funded institutions across Germany are required to purchase 100% sustainable energy,“ said Prof. Dr. Arndt Bode, Chairman of the Board, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. „SuperMUC will help us keep our commitment, while giving the scientific community a best-in-class system to test theories, design experiments and predict outcomes as never before.”
Pioneering Hot Water-cooled Technology
Up to 50 percent of an average air-cooled data center’s energy consumption and carbon footprint today is not caused by computing, but by powering the necessary cooling systems. IBM scientists and developers chose to address this challenge with an innovative concept of hot-water cooling, which eliminates the need for conventional data center air cooling systems. IBM’s hot-water cooling technology directly cools active components in the system such as processors and memory modules with coolant temperatures that can reach as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit, or 45 degrees Celsius.
„As we continue to deliver on our long-term vision of a zero emission data center we may eventually achieve a million fold reduction in the size of SuperMUC, so that it can be reduced to the size of a desktop computer with a much higher efficiency than today,“ said Dr. Bruno Michel, manager, Advanced Thermal Packaging, IBM Research.
SuperMUC combines its hot-water cooling capability, which removes heat 4,000 times more efficiently than air, with 18,000 energy-efficient Intel Xeon processors. In addition to helping with scientific discovery, the integration of hot-water cooling and IBM application-oriented, dynamic systems management software, allows energy to be captured and reused to heat the buildings during the Winter on the sprawling Leibniz Supercomputing Centre campus, for savings of one million Euros ($1.25 million USD) per year.
Europe’s Most Powerful Supercomputer
The SuperMUC system is Europe’s fastest computer, according to the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers announced today. This performance will be used to drive a wide spectrum of research — from simulating the blood flow behind an artificial heart valve, to devise quieter airplanes to unearthing new insights in geophysics, including the understanding of earthquakes. The SuperMUC system is also connected to powerful visualization systems, including a large 4K stereoscopic power wall and a five-sided immersive artificial virtual-reality environment or CAVE for visualizing 3D data sets from fields, including Earth science, astronomy and medicine.
The LRZ is the computer center for Munich’s universities and for the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. It takes care of the scientific data network in Munich, offers a variety of data services, and provides high-end computing facilities for the scientific community across Europe.
The center’s new SuperMUC system is the largest in Europe and one of the most powerful systems in the world . It is part of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) high-performance computing infrastructure for researchers and industrial institutions throughout Europe. The supercomputer is jointly funded by the German federal government and the state of Bavaria. It will be officially inaugurated in July 2012 at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Garching, Germany.