U.S. to use supercomputer for ocean data

Another site:

NCAR Installs 76-Teraflop Supercomputer for Critical Research on Climate Change, Severe Weather

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May 08, 2008

BOULDER—The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has taken delivery of a new IBM supercomputer that will advance research into severe weather and the future of Earth's climate. The supercomputer, known as a Power 575 Hydro- Cluster, is the first in a highly energy-efficient class of machines to be shipped anywhere in the world.

Bluefire. [ENLARGE] (Photo by Carlye Calvin, ©UCAR.) News media terms of use*

Scientists at NCAR and across the country will use the new system to accelerate research into climate change, including future patterns of precipitation and drought around the world, changes to agriculture and growing seasons, and the complex influence of global warming on hurricanes. Researchers also will use it to improve weather forecasting models so society can better anticipate where and when dangerous storms may strike.

Named "bluefire," the new supercomputer has a peak speed of more than 76 teraflops (76 trillion floating-point operations per second). When fully operational, it is expected to rank among the 25 most powerful supercomputers in the world and will more than triple NCAR's sustained computing capacity.

"Bluefire is on the leading edge of high-performance computing technology," says Tom Bettge, director of operations and services for NCAR's Computational and Information Systems Laboratory. "Increasingly fast machines are vital to research into such areas as climate change and the formation of hurricanes and other severe storms. Scientists will be able to conduct breakthrough calculations, study vital problems at much higher resolution and complexity, and get results more quickly than before."

Researchers will rely on bluefire to generate the climate simulations necessary for the next report on global warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which conducts detailed assessments under the auspices of the United Nations. The IPCC was a recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

"NCAR has a well-deserved reputation for excellence in deploying supercomputing resources to address really difficult challenges," says Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM. "Bluefire will substantially expand the organization's ability to investigate climate change, severe weather events, and other important subjects."

Bluefire by the numbers

Bluefire is the second phase of a system called the Integrated Computing Environment for Scientific Simulation (ICESS) at NCAR. After undergoing acceptance testing, it will begin full-scale operations in August. Bluefire, which replaces three supercomputers with an aggregate peak speed of 20 teraflops, will provide supercomputing support for researchers at NCAR and other organizations through 2011.

An IBM Power 575 supercomputer, bluefire houses the new POWER6 microprocessor, which has a clock speed of 4.7 gigahertz. The system consists of 4,064 processors, 12 terabytes of memory, and 150 terabytes of FAStT DS4800 disk storage.

Bluefire relies on a unique, water-based cooling system that is 33 percent more energy efficient than traditional air-cooled systems. Heat is removed from the electronics by water-chilled copper plates mounted in direct contact with each POWER6 microprocessor chip. As a result of this water-cooled system and POWER6 efficiencies, bluefire is three times more energy efficient per rack than its predecessor.

"We're especially pleased that bluefire provides dramatically increased performance with much greater energy efficiency," Bettge says.

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research under primary sponsorship by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this document are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, NASA, or other funding agencies.

Related sites on the World Wide Web

Bluefire Home Page (includes fact sheets and additional images)

Thermal conduction module

By 1987 the information processing power of electronic computers of the 1960s could be held in one hand. The Thermal Conduction Module seen here was the marrow of the large IBM 308X computers. Six inches square, the TCM had room for up to 133 chips, each with 704 circuits. Each ceramic block of the material had 28 to 33 differently wired layers. More than 350,000 holes provided paths for the vertical wiring for layer-to-layer communication. The chips were joined to the substrate through a total of nearly 16,000 contact points, using IBM's unique chip-joining technology. All that circuitry generated 300 watts of heat -- enough to destroy the chips. But the heat was drawn off through spring-loaded aluminum pistons (seen in the cutaway section) that pressed gently against each chip. In turn, the pistons were housed in a "hat" filled with helium, an excellent heat conductor. Chilled water flowing through a conduit attached to the hat whisked the heat away. One TCM alone -- there were about two dozen in a 3081 computer -- packed as much computing punch as a medium-size System/370 of only a decade before. (VV2137)

For additional information on the 3081, visit our online exhibit:
	"A Cavalcade of Mainframes."

Department of Defense gets zippy IBM supercomputer

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Submitted by Layer 8 on Thu, 07/10/2008 - 6:20am.

Aiming to bolster the military’s abilities to forecast weather and model ocean movements the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVO) today said it bought a water-cooled, 90 teraflop IBM supercomputer.

The IBM Power 575 Hydro-Cluster, will be installed at the NAVO Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC), one of four Department of Defense High Performance Computing centers that are part of the .While it will be used mostly by the Navy, the system’s ocean models will be publicly accessible via the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Web site, with the idea that such information can be used to help commercial ships avoid bad weather. The Coast Guard is also expected to use the system to bolster its search-and-rescue operations, IBM said.

The new Power 575 supercomputer uses water-chilled copper plates located above each microprocessor to remove heat from the electronics and requires 80% fewer air conditioning units than air cooled systems, IBM said. The system features 448 processor cores per rack and each rack features 14 2U nodes, each with 32, 4.7-Ghz cores of POWER6 and 3.5 TB of memory, according to IBM.

NAVO uses a variety of platforms, such as survey ships, satellite sensors and buoys , to collect oceanographic and hydrographic data from the world's oceans. For example it performs global sea ice analysis and offers very high-resolution coastal ocean circulation to help ships avoid problem areas of the oceans The agency distributes its data to military and civilian customers.

The new systems will be located at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

IBM's $100 million Roadrunner system installed at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory was recently named the most powerful and energy efficient supercomputer in the world by the TOP500 group. The Roadrunner achieved performance of 1.026 petaflop/s-becoming the first supercomputer ever to reach that performance milestone.

IBM updates high-end servers, returns to water-cooling

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By James Niccolai , IDG News Service , 04/08/2008

SAN FRANCISCO -- IBM announced its most powerful Unix server to date Tuesday, an update to the System p5 595 that will be based on a new Power6 processor running at up to 5GHz.

IBM also unveiled an update to its System p5 575 supercomputer that has a more efficient, water-based system to cool the processors. IBM hasn't used water-cooling in its servers since 1995, but it expects to use it increasingly as customers wrestle with a shortage of power to their data centers.

The new systems, which will be discussed in detail at an IBM event in San Francisco Tuesday, continue a rebranding of IBM's servers that started last week. IBM said then that it was merging its System i and System p server lines into a single Power Systems family that can run IBM's AIX flavor of Unix, Linux or its i5/OS, now called i.

The new high-end machine, called the Power 595, is due for wide availability on May 6. Along with the faster processor it uses a new "point to point" interconnect technology to increase system bandwidth and get the most out of a system's processors, cache memory and main memory. It gives an aggregate memory bandwidth of 1.3Tbps, IBM said.

The Power 595 supports up to 4TB of memory, or twice that of the System p 595. The extra memory is good for handling very large databases, heavy transaction loads or consolidating servers. The system can run as many as 254 virtualized partitions using IBM's PowerVM virtualization software.

"This will be the fastest Unix server in the world," said Scott Handy, IBM vice president of worldwide marketing and strategy, citing benchmark tests running SAP applications.

I guess I would say YES

Detail on :

Blue Gene

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Blue Gene is an IBM Research project dedicated to exploring the
frontiers in supercomputing: in computer architecture, in the software required to program and control massively parallel systems, and in the use of computation to advance our understanding of important biological processes such as protein folding.

The Blue Gene/L machine was designed and built in collaboration with the Department of Energy's NNSA/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and the LLNL system has a peak speed of 596 Teraflops. Blue Gene systems occupy the #1 (LLNL Blue Gene/L) and a total of 4 of the top 10 positions in the TOP500 supercomputer list announced in November 2007.

IBM now offers a Blue Gene Solution. IBM and its collaborators are currently exploring a growing list of applications including hydrodynamics, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, climate modeling and financial modeling.
Details - Blue Gene [IBM Journal of Research and Development]
History - Blue Gene: A vision for protein science using a petaflop supercomputer [IBM Systems Journal]

Photos of Blue Gene/L available here

Industry Links
Unraveling the Mystery of Protein Folding
Physicists Take on Challenge Of Showing How Proteins Fold, The Scientist
The Bridge from Genes to Proteins

Read More

Last updated 6 Dec 2007

OK...Details on Roadrunner...from Wikipedia:P>IBM Roadrunner

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Roadrunner is a supercomputer built by IBM at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. Currently the world's fastest computer, the US$133-million Roadrunner is designed for a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops, achieving 1.026 on May 25, 2008,^[1]^[2]^[3] and to be the world's first TOP500 Linpack sustained 1.0 petaflops system. It is a one-of-a-kind supercomputer, built from commodity parts, with many novel design features.

Overview

IBM built the computer for the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration.^[4]^[5] It is a hybrid design with 12,960 IBM PowerXCell^[6] 8i CPUs and 6,480 AMD Opteron dual-core processors^[7] in specially designed server blades connected by Infiniband. The Roadrunner uses the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and is managed with xCAT distributed computing software. It occupies approximately 6,000 square feet (560 m²)^[8] and became operational in 2008.

The DOE plans to use the computer for simulating how nuclear materials age in order to predict whether the USA's aging arsenal of nuclear weapons is safe and reliable. Other uses for the Roadrunner include the sciences, financial, automotive and aerospace industries.

I was at IBM from 02/65 to 12/95, and did consulting and contract work for 9 years after that. I was in the next to last class of “unit ewcord” basic, and handled a full territory of card machines for almost a year before going to my first 360 training the following year.

I worked mostly on the low-end systems - 360/30 and 40, and most of the low-inventory I/O gear, like OCR, paper tape, etc.I moved on to the 370/135 and 145, the 138 and 48, and the 4381, along with new I/O, and the 4331 and 4341, where I did a temp assignment in the support center.

From there I went to PSR training - the last class to go through VSE basic - and soon had all 57 VSE accounts in and around Memphis assigned to me. That kept me busy, but I still was asked to assist on a lot of hardware problems, all over the country. When PSRs disappeared I moved to systems engineer, and then to technical marketing rep, but I still would occasionally find a two-foot stack of paper on my desk in the morning with a request for help.

I retired just short of 31 years with full pension and benefits, and immediately started contract and consulting work. IBM did not replace me locally, and I had been the assigned PSR for all of the nearby VSE accounts, so I had all the work I could handle. A lot of it involved Y2K readiness, which often meant both hardware and software upgrades. Also, a third-party TCP/IP for VSE was becoming extremely popular, and I did the TCP/IP installation and training for them.

Now at 68 I am comfortably (and happily) obsolete. I taught managerial economics for Webster University (MBA) on the local navy base for a few semesters, and am active in the local Mensa chapter. I do spend my pension and social security, but we don’t really need it because consulting paid SO much better than IBM ever did.

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