PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
Whether it's achievements in your personal life or those of your favorite sports team, you always remember firsts. For supercomputing fans, this month saw a major first. There was the first explicit reference to "exascale" in a federal budget. (Previous budgets set aside money for the development of extreme scale computing.)
Specifically, the Obama administration's 2012 proposed budget, released this month, includes $126 million in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funding for the development of the next generation of supercomputers, which will achieve an exascale level of performance.
The new systems would have peak performance in the exaFLOPS (one quintillion floating point operations per second) range. And they would be used to meet the future computing needs for simulation and modeling applications in the life sciences, climate research, nuclear stewardship and other fields.
Such systems are about 1,000 times more powerful than today's highest performing systems. Current top systems, such as the Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin and the Cray XT5 Jaguar system at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee, have peak performances of 2.57 petaFLOPS and 1.75 petaFLOPS, respectively.
Argonne National
Laboratory will use IBM's next-generation Blue Gene/Q supercomputer, a
system touting a peak performance of 10 petaFLOPS. (Source: IBM)
If approved by Congress, the funding for exascale systems would be part of a broader administration request for $465 million for DOE advanced computing efforts.
For the exascale supercomputers to become a reality, advances will be necessary in several areas. There will need to be new processors, software that can efficiently harness the power of perhaps 100 million cores and improvements in energy efficiencies. From a total system perspective, there will also need to be improvements or enhancements in networking and storage performance. If all goes as planned, the exascale systems should make their debut in the 2018-to-2020 time frame.
In the meantime, work is already under way to bridge the gap from today's single-digit petaFLOPS systems to these future exaFLOPS computers. This month, IBM announced it will be building a 10-petaFLOPS supercomputer for the DOE's Argonne National Laboratory. The system, dubbed Mira, will be built on the next version of IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer architecture, called Blue Gene/Q.
According to IBM, Mira will help researchers become familiar with the capabilities an exascale machine will offer, and it will acquaint them with the programming changes required to take advantage of those capabilities. IBM noted, for example, that researchers would have to scale their current computer codes to make use of the more than 750,000 individual computing cores that will be available in Mira. This exercise will provide researchers with some experience on how scalability might be achieved on an exascale-class system with hundreds of millions of cores.
The Mira supercomputer is expected to be operational next year. IBM anticipates that it will have two other systems operating at 10 petaFLOPS or greater online later in 2012. Those systems include a 10-petaFLOPS supercomputer called Blue Waters for National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois and a 20-petaFLOPS supercomputer called Sequoia for the DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Lab.
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