30-04-2011, 11:53 AM
BlueWaters.pptx (Size: 1.72 MB / Downloads: 101)
Introduction
Blue Waters is expected to be one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
Scientists will create breakthroughs in nearly all fields of science using Blue Waters.
Blue Waters is a joint effort of :
The University of Illinois, its National Center for Supercomputing Applications
IBM, and
The Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation.
It is also supported by the National Science Foundation.
Overview of Supercomputers
The fastest high-performance systems in existence.
Typically multi core
Most require environmentally controlled rooms.
Price tag ranges from $500,000 to millions of dollars.
Present Supercomputers
About the Blue Waters project
It will have a peak performance of 10 petaflops (10 quadrillion calculations every second) .
Proportions:
1 calculation = 1 second
1,000,000,000 calculations = 32 years
1,000,000,000,000 calculations = 31,000 year
Contd..
1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations = 31 million years
1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations = 1 second
Blue Waters computing system
More than 300,000 compute cores
A peak memory bandwidth of nearly 5 petabytes/second
More than 1 petabyte of memory
18 petabytes of disk storage
500 petabytes of archival storage
Support up to 128 GB DDR3 DRAM memory per processor
Have clock frequency in the 3.5-4 GHz range
IBM's multicore POWER7 processors will:
Include eight high-performance cores
Feature simultaneous multithreading
Have three levels of cache
Integrated Application Development Environment
The environment will include debuggers, compilers, mathematical
libraries, support tools and workflow frameworks that can be used to
automatically guide complex, multistep calculations.
I/O subsystem
The Blue Waters I/O subsystem will provide a peak I/O rate greater than 1.5 TB/s .
Petascale science and engineering
To ensure those scientist’s success, the Blue Waters team is helping teams around the country prepare their codes to run on Blue Waters and other computing systems like it.
Software configuration
Blue Waters will use Linux as its operating system.
Low-level active messaging layer.
Eclipse-based application framework to support development.
The Charm++ infrastructure.
Advanced performance tools
Blue Waters Project Office
Project Director Chief Software Architect Thom Dunning Marc Snir
Chief Applications Architect Bill Gropp
Chief Hardware Architect Wen-mei Hwu
Conclusion
Scientists with the Blue Waters will be able to:
Predict the behavior of complex biological systems.
Understand how the cosmos evolved after the Big Bang.
Design new materials at the atomic level.
Predict the behavior of hurricanes and tornadoes.
Simulate complex engineered systems like the power distribution system, airplanes and automobiles.