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The superecomptuer now uses more than 31,000 processing cores

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has been using one of the most powerful supercomputers within the Department of Energy to perform complex calculations required for all sorts of science experiments and projects.

ORNL announced today that its Jaguar supercomputer has been upgraded. Jaguar is a Cray XT4 supercomputer and after the upgrades, it now uses more than 31,000 processing cores. All of those processing cores team up to deliver the capability to process 263 trillion calculations per second (263 teraflops).

ORNL director Thom Mason said in a statement, “The Department of Energy's Leadership Computing Facility is putting unprecedented computing power in the hands of leading scientists to enable the next breakthroughs in science and technology. This upgrade is an essential step along that path, bringing us ever closer to the era of petascale computing [systems capable of thousands of trillions of calculations per second]."

All of the processing power on tap from the Jaguar system is used by scientists in multiple fields. Climate scientists are using the system to calculate the possible consequences of increased greenhouse gases on our environment and how the possible reduction of these gases could benefit the environment. Many other disciplines from fusion research, physics and materials science use the system as well.

With the new upgrade ORNL’s supercomputer will now double its contribution to the Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program.

DailyTech reported on the Cray XT4 first in late 2006. The system was code named Hood and was at the time equipped with AMD dual-core Opteron processors. The ORNL didn’t specify what processors were in use in Jaguar.

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Probably Opterons
By amanojaku on 5/16/2008 1:38:46 PM , Rating: 3
The XT4 is listed as running Opteron CPUs, so the current Jaguar model is probably running the same. The draw is the integrated memory controller; I don't think Intel has a Xeon with an integrated controller yet.

AMD Opteron™ Processors

quote:
The industry leading AMD Opteron microprocessor offers a number of advantages for superior performance and scalability. The AMD processor's on-chip, highly associative data cache supports aggressive out-of-order execution and can issue up to nine instructions simultaneously. The integrated memory controller eliminates the need for a separate Northbridge memory controller chip, providing an extremely low latency path to local memory—less than 60 nanoseconds. This is a significant performance advantage, particularly for algorithms that require irregular memory access. The 128-bit wide memory controller provides 10.6 to 12.8 GB/s local memory bandwidth per AMD Opteron, or more than one byte per FLOP. This balance brings a performance advantage to algorithms that stress local memory bandwidth. HyperTransport™ technology enables a 6.4 GB/s direct connection between the processor and the Cray XT4 or Cray XT3 interconnect, removing the PCI bottleneck inherent in most interconnects.


http://www.cray.com/products/xt4/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehalem_%28microarchi...




RE: Probably Opterons
By cobalt42 on 5/16/2008 2:03:29 PM , Rating: 2
You're correct:
http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/jaguar/

Also, the title incorrectly calls the lab "Oakridge". It's two words. (The text of the story is correct.)


RE: Probably Opterons
By PandaBear on 5/16/2008 5:49:40 PM , Rating: 2
Hmm..

What would happen to all the old processor? Ebay anyone? They could just sell it as souvenirs "former super computer processor" to raise enough fund for the new processors, or even better, as income to part of the project.


RE: Probably Opterons
By Viditor on 5/16/2008 10:16:56 PM , Rating: 2
That's 15,500 Barcelonas in a single computer...


RE: Probably Opterons
By SocketAKing on 5/17/2008 1:18:15 PM , Rating: 1
Not exactly.

The 31,0000 was also referring the graphical processing cores.

All those 3rd Generation Opty's wont do you any good if you can't even render in 3d on a screen (especially considering the type of work Crays do can be VERY graphically intensive at times).


RE: Probably Opterons
By SocketAKing on 5/17/2008 1:18:59 PM , Rating: 1
lol, i meant 31,000.

I guess that's why they force me to preview...


RE: Probably Opterons
By SocketAKing on 5/17/2008 1:22:36 PM , Rating: 1
I did some reading. They are using QuadCore Opterons, not dual core.

So Agena and not Barcelona if i'm not mistaken.


RE: Probably Opterons
By Viditor on 5/18/2008 12:37:43 AM , Rating: 2
Barcelona is quad core server, Agena is quad core desktop...
So it is Barcelona.


RE: Probably Opterons
By murphyslabrat on 5/19/2008 12:03:41 PM , Rating: 2
Hi Mistaken, I'm Sam.


RE: Probably Opterons
By TETRONG on 5/17/2008 7:20:52 PM , Rating: 1
Slightly confused by all of this.

If they are trying to run simulations that can be executed in parallel why base the system on CISC CPU's?

Shouldn't they be using GP-GPU's?

If a single PS3 is good for 2 teraflops, then 128 of them would buy you 256 teraflops, no? Okay, so you'd lose a little in translation, but these game systems would still give you over 200 teraflops.

Wonder how much this system costs, 128 PS3's will set you back $51,000 tax dollars.

Which is why the airfoce is buying them for their simulations. http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/05/us-air-force-se...

Ridiculous


RE: Probably Opterons
By Shining Arcanine on 5/18/2008 5:36:39 AM , Rating: 2
Simulations on super computers are mostly done with pre-made software and most of the scientists that use it did not actually write it. I do undergraduate research in a lab that is run by the developers of one such software package and it has hundreds of thousands of lines of code, all written in Fortran. Porting it to something as exotic as the PS3 would require a complete rewrite to be able to use the SPEs, assuming that compilers that provide the necessary intrinsics even exist.

Yes, you can get the super computing power by buying PS3s, but have fun running simulations on them. You either will not be able to run them or will have to write them yourself, which is probably what the Air Force is doing.


RE: Probably Opterons
By Shining Arcanine on 5/18/2008 5:39:25 AM , Rating: 1
I meant one of the developers, not all of them.

Also, I forgot to mention, in the Air Force, technicians are cheap. They pay them, 25 cents per hour (unless they changed it since my Uncle left the Air Force in the early 80s), less than universities pay graduate students, so the Air Force is probably using their low cost technicians to write all of the code necessary to run the simulations.


"thousands of trillions"
By dever on 5/16/2008 1:31:02 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
thousands of trillions
Is that similar to quadrillions?




RE: "thousands of trillions"
By Cuddlez on 5/16/2008 1:48:22 PM , Rating: 2
I think they say "thousands of trillions" because quadrillion can refer to 2 different numbers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrillion


RE: "thousands of trillions"
By ksherman on 5/16/2008 2:01:45 PM , Rating: 2
RE: "thousands of trillions"
By dever on 5/16/2008 2:16:01 PM , Rating: 2
I actually looked that up first just to make sure, but it sounds like 10^15 is now commonly accepted.


Bacronyms....
By oTAL (blog) on 5/16/2008 2:19:05 PM , Rating: 2
Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment

INCITE....

*lol*
"Innovative and Novel" kind of feels like you're trying just a bit too hard...




RE: Bacronyms....
By Gul Westfale on 5/17/2008 1:01:30 AM , Rating: 2
Severe Acute Redundancy Syndrome?


RE: Bacronyms....
By murphyslabrat on 5/19/2008 12:02:41 PM , Rating: 2
or, Fairly Acute Redundant Cerebral Expungance.

FARCE for short.


Can it run Crysis maxed out?
By makots on 5/18/2008 11:13:18 PM , Rating: 2
Again, the question for the DOD is can this baby run Crysis at max res. Or do we need another trilion dollars to go to 32,000 cores as Nvidia recommends for this game :}
Lordy




By KinEnriquez on 5/19/2008 1:10:12 AM , Rating: 2
These references on whether something can run on Crysis is getting stale. Give it a rest, will ya?


Super Computer
By Vinny141 on 5/16/08, Rating: -1