The world’s fastest supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory is more than double the speed and scale of the previous benchmark by breaking through the "petaflop barrier" of 1,000 trillion operations per second. That's nearly three times faster than the leading contenders on the November 2007 TOP500 list of supercomputers worldwide. Yet compared to most traditional supercomputers of today, hybrid design of the supercomputer at Los Alamos delivers world-leading energy efficiency, as measured in flops per watt.
Designed by IBM, the world's first "hybrid" supercomputer introduces the use of the IBM PowerXCell™ 8i chip, an enhanced Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.™) chip—originally developed for video game platforms—in conjunction with x86 processors from AMD™. The supercomputer was built for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration and will be housed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
In total, the supercomputer at Los Alamos connects 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron™ chips and 12,960 PowerXCell 8i processors. The Opteron processors handle standard processing such as file system I/O. The PowerXCell 8i processors accelerate mathematical and CPU-intensive processing.
Two PowerXCell 8i-based blade servers (IBM BladeCenter® QS22) and one AMD-based blade (IBM BladeCenter LS21) are integrated into a specialized "tri-blade" configuration. The machine is composed of a total of 3,456 tri-blade units, each of which can run at 400 billion operations per second (400 gigaflops).
Its 10,000 connections—both InfiniBand® and Gigabit Ethernet—require 57 miles of fiber optic cable. The system has 80 terabytes of memory, weighs 500,000 pounds, and is housed in 288 refrigerator-sized, IBM BladeCenter racks occupying 6,000 square feet.
The supercomputer at Los Alamos introduces a scale unknown until now. PowerXCell 8i acceleration helps deliver the amazingly complex multi-scale science simulations, such as the inner workings of an entire aircraft in one setting. According to John Morrison, leader of the high-performance computing division at Los Alamos, the supercomputer "will enable us to tackle problems we couldn't tackle before. We'll be able to run a different level of problems. We'll be able to do calculations that we wouldn't even consider before."
At Los Alamos, about 80% of the supercomputer's capacity will be devoted to the national nuclear weapons program—ensuring the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. It will also be used for research into astronomy, human genome science and climate change.
IBM is developing a new software architecture to make Cell/B.E based architecture.-powered hybrid computing broadly accessible, including a Multi-core Software Developers Kit, programming methodology and libraries that focus on efficient utilization of the Cell/B.E. architecture. Look to Cell/B.E.-based hybrid supercomputing to revolutionize applications for financial services, energy exploration, information-based medicine, digital animation, and oil and gas production. And this is just the beginning.
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