Supercomputing from clusters to clouds

by Ian Monroe, Charles Berretand Michael Scott Leonard, Medill Reports

Intrepid is an IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer: a huge, ultra-powerful machine used by scientists and researchers to model complex systems with a degree of precision never before achieved. Built over five years, at a cost of $77 million, Intrepid exemplifies the state of the art in supercomputing. In this realm, speed isn’t measured in gigahertz but rather in floating-point operations, or flops. Intrepid provides half a petaflop of computation capacity, or 500 trillion flops. A poster on the wall says it would take two stacks of MacBook laptops, each as tall as the Sears Tower, to match Intrepid’s power.

“This is a 50,000 cubic-foot-per-minute air handler,” says Allcock, the operations director for the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. “You see these typically on skyscrapers — they are the things that move the ventilation inside skyscrapers. We have six of them, so we move 300,000 cubic-feet-per-minute of air through this room.” Moving all that air is key to keeping Intrepid’s 160,000 cores, or central processing units, from overheating under the load of the advanced scientific calculations being carried out 24 hours a day. ….

Beyond Intrepid, the computing facilities at Argonne contribute a multitude of other important resources to the scientific community. Advanced visualization systems developed at Argonne help researchers explore the structure of proteins and understand the mechanics of supernovae — exploding stars. Software, such as the Access Grid, allows collaborators all over the world to interact in real time using sophisticated video conferencing. The open-source Nimbus software lets scientists and businesses summon supercomputers on demand and on the cheap. And the collective experience of years in the high-performance computing field feeds back into the development of next-generation systems that will dwarf today’s supercomputers in speed and efficiency. …

…. “In the future of supercomputing, [electrical] power is everything,” he said. “What we are planning toward is a machine that’s 40 times as powerful as [Intrepid] in about twice the space, and [with] about three times the power consumption,” Allcock said.

But Allcock and Papka stressed that significant problems remaining before computing tasks can be spread with optimal efficiency across large numbers of processors.

“We have ideas,” Papka said. “We don’t have the answers. That’s why it’s a research problem.” See if you have any answers.