A new supercomputer is joining Kraken and Jaguar in Oak Ridge.
On October 1, 2010, the High Performance Computing staff of the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) welcomed the newest supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), after the installation of phase one of a 40-cabinet configuration. The machine is the result of a collaborative agreement between National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Department of Energy.
According to James H. Rogers, director of operations for NCCS, the specs for NOAA’s new supercomputer are astounding: It is the next generation of the Cray XT/XE series of supercomputers, which upon initial installation will include a 264TF (teraFLOP) XE6, making it 50 times more powerful than any existing NOAA resource. Upon completion, the yet-to-be named supercomputer will be capable of performing more than 1 million billion calculations in a second (a petaflop). This super-fast computational capability will enable NOAA to better model components of climate change.
“Prior to the availability of this new system, NOAA’s compute resources limited it to a typical grid increment of 200 km for the atmosphere and 100 km for the ocean model,” said Rogers. “With this new Cray XE6, we expect NOAA scientists will quickly transition to a much higher resolution 50 km atmosphere and 25 km ocean model.”
Rogers says future upgrades to the NOAA supercomputer will improve performance even more, to a resolution of 25 km atmosphere and 10 km ocean model with improved and much more computationally complex physics. The bottom line? This better modeling equates to more accurate scientific results and the opportunity for improved practical application.
After its upgrade next summer, this system will join the two existing petascale systems, Jaguar and Kraken, as the third petascale system at the facility – meaning more research time for scientists. The user communities for these systems apply for CPU time on Kraken and Jaguar from all over the world, and even though these systems are delivering more than a billion compute hours for science each year, demand for time continues to far outweigh supply. Fortunately, the NOAA computer will deliver a very timely contribution to this demand, offering a system that is specifically designed and managed to support climate researchers and that will deliver hundreds of millions of compute hours in its first year.
While all three systems contain many similar architectural features, the new computer differs from its larger brothers, Jaguar and Kraken, in one significant aspect. Both Jaguar and Kraken are based on a 6-core AMD Opteron processor. The NOAA system will initially be based on a 12-core AMD Opteron processor code named Magny-Cours, with a proposed upgrade to a 1.1PF system in 2011 and a final upgrade to a new 16-core AMD Opteron with the code name Interlagos.
The new supercomputer offers other benefits as well. Rogers says the power and cooling costs for the NOAA XE6 system are about half that of a similarly sized XT5 system, making it more cost-effective and environmentally friendly.
Oak Ridge, TN
