HPC NEWS
Computation Institute announces Beagle landing
Beagle, a new supercomputer for biomedical simulation and data analysis, has arrived thanks to a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Centre for Research Resources (NCRR). The Computation Institute
(CI), a joint initiative between the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne), has announced the introduction of a 150 Tflops, 18,000-core Cray XE6 supercomputer that will support computation, simulation and data analysis for the biomedical research community. Named after HMS Beagle,
the system will be housed in the new Theory and Computing Sciences (TCS) building at
Argonne and will be available for use by university researchers, their collaborators and other investigators nationwide. ‘Innovative research requires access to the latest technologies,’ said NCRR director Barbara Alving. ‘This high- performance tool will serve as a core resource that will help ensure scientists remain at the forefront of modern biomedical research.’ The unique capabilities
of the system will help basic, translational, and clinical research leading to improved diagnostic strategies and medical treatment. It is scheduled to be in the TCS machine room by the end of the year, with initial operation, for early adopters, set for the 202nd
Cray colaborating with Nvidia for GPU-based XE6 blades
At the 2010 GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, Cray announced that it is developing blades based on the Nvidia Tesla 20-Series GPUs for use in the Cray XE6 product line. The combination of Cray’s new Gemini system interconnect (which is featured in the Cray XE6 system), paired with Nvidia GPUs, will give Cray XE6 customers a powerful combination of scalability and production-quality GPU-based HPC in a single system. ‘We spend a significant
amount of time meeting with our customers and talking about how we can build the most scalable HPC systems that blend industry- leading technologies designed to meet their supercomputing needs,’ said Barry Bolding, vice president of Cray’s products division. ‘Our customers have expressed a growing interest in having accelerator technology in Cray systems, and we believe a Cray XE6 blade with Nvidia GPUs will provide the performance, scalability, and reliability that a growing segment of our customer base is looking for. The use of GPUs as accelerators in the HPC
www.scientific-computing.com
marketplace is maturing, and we are excited to be working with Nvidia to offer this functionality to our customers.’ With this future addition, Cray will be able to offer its customers a full range of accelerator solutions for HPC – from the deskside to the supercomputer. The Cray CX line of deskside and midrange systems, including the Cray CX1 and Cray CX1000 systems, are currently available with Nvidia Tesla GPUs. Cray and Nvidia continue to work together on the development of future GPU accelerator technologies in HPC as a potential path towards exascale computing. Cray is partnering with Nvidia on a team that was recently awarded a $25m research grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of its Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) programme. ‘The Cray XE6 is designed
to solve the system challenges of petascale computing just as Tesla GPUs are providing the computational power efficiency to bring this level of computing to the larger HPC community,’ said Andy Keane, general manager, Tesla business at Nvidia.
anniversary of Darwin’s birthday on 12 February 2011. Beagle should be placed into full production by the second quarter of the calendar year. Ian Foster, director of the CI
and principal investigator for the project, with the university’s team of technical and domain specialists, identified the need for a powerful computational environment that would serve the growing resource- intensive requirements of the biomedical research community. ‘ Computation is fundamentally
changing the nature of research in most disciplines, and biomedical researchers with access to advanced computational resources are more likely to make
transformative progress,’ said Foster. ‘We are excited about the opportunity to advance the biomedicine research frontier and greatly appreciate the support of the NIH-NCRR for this initiative.’ Beagle is expected to be among
the top 50 fastest supercomputers in the world and will be one of the fastest systems fully devoted to life sciences. It uses a unique combination of AMD multicore processors, Cray’s powerful Gemini system interconnect, and 3D torus topology in an infrastructure designed to scale to more than one million processor cores. With future investments, Beagle can be upgraded to achieve sustained Pflops performance.
Allinea Software and CEA to collaborate further
In a bid to address large-scale debugging with MPC and CUDA, a further collaboration agreement has been signed between Allinea Software and the French government- funded technological research organisation, the CEA. To date, the aim of the collaboration between the supplier of software development tools for high performance computing (HPC) and the French organisation has been to develop
enhancements to the Allinea DDT (Distributed Debugging Tool) for next generation hybrid and ‘many-core’ computer systems. Based on the work carried out in phase one, both parties are seeking to address a major challenge and offer a solution for large scale systems. Dr David Lecomber, CTO
at Allinea Software, explains: ‘Research organisations require ever more powerful computational resources, and so their software needs to run on ever larger numbers of
processors. This increases the complexity and risks of errors in software development; Allinea is one of the only suppliers of tools that can handle this complexity and identify errors before they hold up important research.
‘Based on all of the knowledge we acquired from the first project with CEA, this new collaboration intends to address the concerns and support the aims of all HPC developers worldwide. A key aim is clearly to provide a solution now and in the future for MPC unified parallel runtime large scale debugging.’ Phase two will focus on making debugging tools both portable and easy to use for large scale debugging well over 100,000 cores. Another important aim is to improve the previous work carried out on CUDA debugging by adding more features to address the CUDA architecture and fully exploit the enhancements that Nvidia now offers.
SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD DECEMBER 2010/JANUARY 2011 13
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36