NASA AMES INSTALLS WORLD'S FIRST ALTIX 512-PROCESSOR SUPERCOMPUTER
November
17, 2003
Michael
Mewhinney
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
Phone: 650/604-3937 or 650/604-9000
E-mail: mmewhinney@mail.arc.nasa.gov
NASA's
high-performance computing capabilities have taken a giant step forward
with the installation of the world's first 512-processor SGI Altix
single-system image (SSI) supercomputer at NASA Ames Research Center,
Moffett Field, Calif.
NASA Ames,
a renowned leader in the development of large single-system image machines,
has been collaborating with SGI over the past seven years in the development
of the world's first 256-, 512- and 1,024- processor global shared memory
systems. Recently, engineers at NASA and SGI worked together to expand
the capabilities of the SGI Altix line of scalable systems. The latest
result is NASA's new 512-processor SSI Altix system based on the Linux
operating system, the first of its kind in the world.
"With
the addition of the new SGI Altix system, NASA's high-end computing testbed
activities in support of the agency's science and engineering missions
will be greatly enhanced," said Dr.Walt Brooks, chief of the NASA
Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at NASA Ames Research Center, located
in California's Silicon Valley. "Thanks to its outstanding performance
capabilities, this new testbed is already helping NASA achieve breakthrough
results to meet major challenges in atmospheric and ocean modeling and
aerospace vehicles," Brooks added.
The
SGI Altix 512-processor system is part of an ongoing NASA effort to push
the limits of high-performance computing. "Creating and using this
system took just a matter of weeks - from September to October,"
said Jim Taft, lead for the advanced computing technologies effort at
NASA Ames. "The current system is already in partial production,
running mission-critical computations in aeronautics and Earth sciences
around the clock. With the current workload, stability of the system has
been excellent," Taft said.
According
to Bob Ciotti, an Ames research scientist and the lead for the center's
Terascale Applications Group, the new supercomputer achieved a Linpack
Rmax rate of 2.45 teraflops and a STREAM Triad rate of 1.007 terabytes
per second, the fastest performance measurement in the world by both
ratings for a shared memory system, and the first to exceed the 1 terabyte/second
level on the STREAM benchmark.
"Shared-memory
systems have the communication characteristics necessary to scale applications
to hundreds of processors," Ciotti explained. "With this new
Altix, the worst-case communication latency is less than a microsecond, and
that's important for sustained performance when running on all 512
processors."
The
new supercomputer is being used for a joint effort by NASA Headquarter,
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Ames Research Center, and Goddard Space Flight
Center to deliver high-resolution ocean analysis in the framework of the
ECCO (Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean) Consortium,
which involves the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
"The turnaround time users typically see on large ocean simulations
can take months," Ciotti said. "By dedicating half of the machine
to the ECCO project and scaling the code to run efficiently on all the
processors, we now expect turnaround to be about two to three days."
Scientists of the ECCO Consortium believe that by running in this very
high-performance environment, it will help them better understand ocean
circulation and its impact on global climate patterns.
The
new SGI Altix SSI system is both faster and more efficient than its predecessor,
which was the world's first 1,024-processor SGI Origin-based supercomputer,
acquired by NASA Ames in November 2001. The Altix system also provides
dramatically better price/performance, utilizing both the Intel Itanium
2 processors and a 64-bit Linux operating environment.
NASA
Ames' quest for building increasingly larger SSI systems is driven
by the goal of providing the simplest and most efficient system for high-performance
computing to its scientific users. This simplicity in design has translated
into rapid advancement through each stage of the project.
"As
we progressed through each stage of development, from 64, to 128, to 512
processors, the system has performed almost flawlessly, with performance
numbers routinely three to four times the previous best results at NAS
with a similar number of processors," said Taft.
The new Altix system is driven by Intel Itanium 2 processors
and has a total memory of about 1 terabyte. Introduced in January 2003,
the Altix 3000 systems incorporate the high-performance SGI NUMAflex global
shared memory architecture. The NUMAflex design enables the CPU,
memory and its operating systems, graphics and storage to be packaged
into modular components, or "bricks."
The
new supercomputer is the first in a series of high end computing testbeds
driven by a recently forged partnership between NASA's Office of Aerospace
Technology and Office of Earth Science.
-end-
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