Rebirth of the supercomputer

gallery

The name Cray is synonymous with supercomputing, as is the image of physically huge, room filling computers with an equally huge price tag.

However, everything changed during the nineties as Moore's Law came into effect and saw affordable workstations and servers that were capable of doing everything those early supercomputers could, and more, for not only less money but less associated running costs in terms of power supply and cooling as well as taking up a lot less room of course.

Inevitably, many of the smaller companies in the business disappeared along with the notion that supercomputing had a future. Yet Cray are still going strong, and the likes of HP and IBM bought up many of those smaller companies in order to exploit the skill and technology resources represented and have been active in the high performance computing field ever since.

Racing ahead

I was made aware of the return of the supercomputer in 2004 when I visited the BMW-Sauber Formula 1 factory just outside Zurich for the launch of ALBERT. This 530 AMD Opteron processor and 1TB RAM powered beast, running within specially designed APC high-density cooling enclosures, existed purely to perform computational fluid dynamics calculations. Analysing the aerodynamics of car design, and complementing the work within the wind tunnel at the same factory, this is used to shave precious fractions of a second from lap times. Ideal work for the supercomputer!

Indeed, supercomputers are alive and well and on the rise as demand for ever more highly calculation-intensive tasks continues. Be that solving quantum mechanical physics problems, climate research (including research into global warming and even weather forecasting), molecular modelling or simulating the detonation of nuclear weapons.

The fact is that universities, military agencies and scientific research laboratories are all demanding more power from their computers, and that's good news for the enterprise because what is developed in the fields of academia and defence eventually filters down to the business sector, or at least the really useful bits do. Without the supercomputer we would not have vector processing, liquid cooling, parallel file-systems or RAID arrays/striped disks for example.

Enterprise delivery

This push towards business is reflected in announcements from the likes of SGI which has stated it is shifting focus towards the enterprise user. "The company's core server, supercomputing and storage platforms feature the high-performance architecture needed to solve difficult, data-intensive problems in a broad range of markets, from national laboratories to IT data centres" said Dennis McKenna, chief executive of SGI.

In fact, SGI recently demonstrated a Linux single system image running on a world-record 1,024 processors using an Altix 4700 system installed in Munich at the Leibinz Rechen-Zentrum (LRZ) centre. LRZ houses Germany's National Supercomputer System, and the Altix 4700 installation marked the completion of LRZ's Phase I deployment, which incorporates 4,096 Intel Itanium 2 processors, 17TB of global shared memory, and a 660TB SGI InfiniteStorage solution.

The personal supercomputer

The advances in supercomputing design at the 'low end' of the sector can be seen nowhere more obviously than in the Tyan Typhoon PSC: the first Personal Supercomputer. Larger than a desktop machine, think of it more as a deskside unit, the Typhoon PSC has eight processors and 64Gb RAM delivering a 70 Gigaflop punch with the double whammy of (relatively) low noise levels of under 45dB and, importantly, low power consumption. The maximum configuration of eight AMD Opteron processors, configured as four cluster nodes with two processors each, and 64GB of DDR400/333 memory combines with eight integrated Gigabit Ethernet ports and the capacity for four Serial ATA HDD devices.

Email to a friend

Print this page