Argonne National Laboratory's IBM Blue Gene/P, The Fastest Supercomputer In The World For Open Science.

Argonne National Laboratory's IBM Blue Gene/P, The Fastest Supercomputer In The World For Open Science.

ARGONNE, Ill. (June 18, 2008) — The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory's IBM Blue Gene/P high-performance computing system is now the fastest supercomputer in the world for open science, according to the semiannual Top500 List of the world's fastest computers.

The Top500 List was announced today during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.

The Blue Gene/P – known as Intrepid and located at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) – also ranked third fastest overall. Both rankings represent the first time an Argonne-based supercomputing system has ranked in the top five of the industry's definitive list of supercomputers.

The Blue Gene/P has a peak-performance of 557 Teraflops (put in other terms, 557 trillion calculations per second). Intrepid achieved a speed of 450.3 Teraflops on the Linpack application used to measure speed for the Top500 rankings.

"Intrepid's speed and power reflect the DOE Office of Science's determined effort to provide the research and development community with powerful tools that enable them to make innovative and high-impact science and engineering breakthroughs," said Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for computing, environmental and life sciences at Argonne.

"The ALCF and Intrepid have only just begun to have a meaningful impact on scientific research," Stevens said. "In addition, continued expansion of ALCF computing resources will not only be instrumental in addressing critical scientific research challenges related to climate change, energy, health and our basic understanding of the world, but in the future will transform and advance how science research and engineering experiments are conducted and attract social sciences research projects, as well."

"Scientists and society are already benefiting from ALCF resources," said Peter Beckman, ALCF acting director. "For example, ALCF's Blue Gene resources have allowed researchers to make major strides in evaluating the molecular and environmental features that may lead to the clinical diagnosis of Parkinson's disease and Lewy body dementia, as well as to simulate materials and designs that are important to the safe and reliable use of nuclear energy plants."

Eighty percent of Intrepid's computing time has been set aside for open science research through the DOE Office of Science's (SC) highly select Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. There are currently 20 INCITE projects at the ALCF that will use 111 million hours of computing time this year. SC's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research provides high-level computer power focused on large-scale installation used by scientists and engineers in many disciplines.

The Top500 List is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim in Germany, Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The list made its debut in June 1993 and ranked as No. 1 DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory's Thinking Machine Corporation's CM-5, with 1,024 processors and a peak-performance of 131 gigaflops.

Argonne National Laboratory brings the world's brightest scientists and engineers together to find exciting and creative new solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America 's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

For more information, please contact Angela Hardin (630/252-5501 or ahardin@anl.gov) at Argonne.

Tags: IBM Blue Gene/P, Argonne National Laboratory, International Supercomputing Conference, ALCF, INCITE, Hans Meuer, Jack Dongarra, Erich Strohmaier, Horst Simon, CM-5

One quadrillion floating point operations per second Supercomputer, “Roadrunner,” Tops 31st TOP 500 SuperComputer List

MANNHEIM, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif. & KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—With the publication of the latest edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers today (Wednesday, June 18), the global high performance computing community has officially entered a new realm—a supercomputer with a peak performance of more than 1 petaflop/s (one quadrillion floating point operations per second).

The new No. 1 system, built by IBM for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory and and named “Roadrunner,” by LANL after the state bird of New Mexico achieved performance of 1.026 petaflop/s—becoming the first supercomputer ever to reach this milestone. At the same time, Roadrunner is also one of the most energy efficient systems on the TOP500.

The 31st edition of the TOP500 list was released at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany. Since 1993, the list has been produced twice a year and is the most extensive survey of trends and changes in the global supercomputing arena.

“Over the past few months, there were a number of rumors going around about whether Roadrunner would be ready in time to make the list, as well as whether other high-profile systems would submit performance numbers,” said Erich Strohmaier, a computer scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a founding editor of the TOP500 list. “So, as the reports came in during recent weeks, it’s been both exciting and challenging to compile this edition.”

The Roadrunner system is based on the IBM QS22 blades which are built with advanced versions of the processor in the Sony PlayStation 3, displaces the reigning IBM BlueGene/L system at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Blue Gene/L, with a performance of 478.2 teraflop/s (trillions of floating point operations per second) is now ranked No. 2 after holding the top position since November 2004.

Rounding out the top five positions, all of which are in the U.S., are the new IBM BlueGene/P (450.3 teraflop/s) at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, the new Sun SunBlade x6420 “Ranger” system (326 teraflop/s) at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas – Austin, and the upgraded Cray XT4 “Jaguar” (205 teraflop/s) at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Among all systems, Intel continues to power an increasing number, with Intel processors now found in 75 percent of the TOP500 supercomputers, up from 70.8 percent of the 30th list released last November.

Other highlights from the latest list include:

• Quad-core processor based systems have taken over the TOP500 quite rapidly. Already 283 systems are using them. Two hundred three systems are using dual-core processors, only eleven systems still use single core processors, and three systems use IBMs advanced Sony PlayStation 3 processor with 9 cores.
• The top industrial customer, at No. 10, is the French oil company: Total Exploration Production.
• IBM held on to its lead in systems with 210 systems (42 percent) over Hewlett Packard with 183 systems (36.6 percent). IBM had 232 systems (46.4 percent) six months ago, compared to HP with 166 systems (33.2 percent).
• IBM remains the clear leader in the TOP500 list in performance with 48 percent of installed total performance (up from 45), compared to HP with 22.4 percent (down from 23.9). In the system category Dell, SGI and Cray follow with 5.4 percent, 4.4 percent and 3.2 percent respectively.
• The last system on the list would have been listed at position 200 in the previous TOP500 just six months ago. This is the largest turnover rate in the 16-year history of the TOP500 project.

For the first time, the TOP500 list will also provide energy efficiency calculations for many of the computing systems and will continue tracking them in consistent manner.

• Most energy efficient supercomputers are based on
  • IBM QS22 Cell processor blades (up to 488 Mflop/s/Watt),
  • IBM BlueGene/P systems (up to 376 Mflop/s/Watt)
• Intel Harpertown quad-core blades are catching up fast:
  • IBM BladeCenter HS21with low-power processors (up to 265 Mflop/s/Watt)
  • SGI Altix ICE 8200EX Xeon quad-core nodes, (up to 240 Mflop/s/Watt) ,
  • Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL2x220 with double density blades (up to 227 Mflop/s/Watt)
• These systems are already ahead of BlueGene/L (up to 210 Mflop/s/Watt).

Rounding out the Top 10 systems are:

• The No. 6 system is the top system outside the U.S., installed in Germany at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ). It is an IBM BlueGene/P system and was measured at 180 Tflop/s.
• The No. 7 system is installed at a new center, the New Mexico Computing Applications Center (NMCAC) in Rio Rancho, NM. It is built by SGI and based on the Altix ICE 8200 model. It was measured at 133.2 Tflop/s.
• For the second time, India placed a system in the top10. The Computational Research Laboratories, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd. in Pune, India, installed a Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system. They integrated this system with their own innovative routing technology and achieved a performance of 132.8 Tflop/s which was sufficient for No. 8.
• The No. 9 system is a new BlueGene/P system installed at the Institut du Développement et des Ressources en Informatique Scientifique (IDRIS) in France, which was measured at 112.5 Tflop/s.
• The last new system in the TOP10 – at No. 10 – is also an SGI Altix ICE 8200 system. It is the biggest system installed at an industrial customer, Total Exploration Production. It was ranked based on a Linpack performance of 106.1 Tflop/s.

The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 257 of the 500 systems. The European share (184 systems – up from 149) is still rising and is again larger then the Asian share (48 – down from 58 systems).

Dominant countries in Asia are Japan with 22 systems (up from 20), China with 12 systems (up from 10), India with 6 systems (down from 9), and Taiwan with 3 (down from 11).

In Europe, UK remains the No. 1 with 53 systems (48 six months ago). Germany improved but is still in the No. 2 spot with 46 systems (31 six months ago).

The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Tags: 31st TOP 500 SuperComputer List, Roadrunner, International Supercomputing Conference, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, IBM BlueGene/P