David Ellsworth, NASA/Ames
Nasa/Ames
high-performance computing
period is crucial, as companies – even those in the oil and gas sector, do not want to have to buy in a completely new HPC system every few years. Te UK Met Office announced that it was
purchasing a new £97 million Cray system earlier this year. A multi-year project, the system – based on a Cray XC40 – will be somewhere in the region of 16 petaflops of peak performance with 20 petabytes of storage once the contract is finished in 2017. Bolding said: ‘Some of the first sites where we
Scale interactions of Hurricane Sandy (labeled S) and environmental flows. The Coupled Advanced Modeling and Visualization (CAMVis) framework produced a remarkable 7-day track and intensity forecast of Hurricane Sandy, made possible by improved simulation of the interactions among Sandy, the upper-level trough (labeled T) and the high-low blocking system (labeled H and L)
newer CPU technology to fit into an older motherboard without the need to replace the whole system. Bolding said: ‘Cray has designed small
cards to make that a more cost effective change for our customers. We designed small cards on which the processors and the memory are socketed, so when a new generation comes out, we are actually only replacing a very small component.’ However, the particular requirements of
Nasa’s users mean that switching to GPUs is viewed cautiously. Tigpen went as far as to say that if Nasa upgraded to a GPU-based system, then an increase in performance of anything up to 25 per cent would still be insufficient to warrant the extra effort that would have to go into porting applications, and then optimising the codes for GPUs. ‘We need to support the user base,’ said Tigpen. Pleiades, the HECC machine, is a SGI
supercomputer made up of 163 racks (11,312 nodes) which contain 211,872 CPU cores and 724 TB of memory. Te system also has four racks that have been enhanced with Nvidia GPUs but, as a fraction of the total system, this is used for only a few applications that really lend themselves to the massively parallel nature of GPUs.
Continuing contracts It is a common practice in HPC to award multi-stage, multi-year contracts, rather than one-off procurements. Te frequency of such multi-stage contracts is not increasing, which suggests that it is a specific group of HPC users with precise requirements that most oſten use these kinds of contracts because they ensure built in upgrades. Bolding said: ‘An example of that is the UK’s Met Office,
www.scientific-computing.com l
where they have a multi-stage installation over time. We have seen it for many years, which is why we made it a market requirement for our products.’ Another example is a contract that was
awarded to SGI in March 2015, by the energy company Total; it choose SGI to upgrade its supercomputer ‘Pangea’, which is located at Total’s Jean Feger Scientific and Technical Centre in Pau, France. SGI boosted Pangea’s then current SGI ICE X system with an additional 4.4 petaflops of compute power, supported with M-Cell technology, storage and the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600 v3 product family. At the time of the announcement, Jorge
Titinger, president and CEO, SGI highlighted that Total had been a customer of SGI for more than 15 years, and SGI’s goal has been continually to provide the capacity and power required for the company to pursue its oil and gas research throughout the world. Upgrading and supporting systems over a continued
saw these large multi-stage procurements were some of the national weather centres. Tey have always bought multi-stage because they don’t like to swap out their infrastructure very oſten, as it risks taking them out of production.’
SOME OF THE FIRST SITES WHERE WE SAW THESE LARGE MULTI- STAGE PROCUREMENTS WERE SOME OF THE NATIONAL WEATHER CENTRES
One aspect of using multi-year contracts,
especially for storage, is that customers can take advantage of the inexorable march of technology, as hard disks will at least increase in capacity, if not drop in price every year. By only buying as much storage as is needed immediately, and then adding more capacity as required, customers will oſten get a better price for the same capacity. Tere will continue to be a number of options
for upgrading legacy HPC systems and, while some may seem more appealing than others, ultimately it takes a careful understanding of the system’s user base to decide the best path, and the rate at which to upgrade. l
Pleiades now features its 6th-generation Intel processor. The addition of the Haswell racks displayed here brought Pleiades’ peak performance to over 5.3 petaflops
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