Extending more than 50 years of supercomputing leadership, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) announced today that they have finalized their contract with IBM to build the world's first sustained petascale computational system dedicated to open scientific research.

This leadership-class project, called Blue Waters, is supported by a $208 million grant from the National Science Foundation and will come online in 2011.

"Blue Waters will be an unrivaled national asset that will have a powerful impact on both science and society," said Thom Dunning NCSA director and a professor of chemistry at Illinois. "Scientists around the country -- simulating new medicines or materials, the weather, disease outbreaks, or complex engineered systems like power plants and aircraft -- are poised to make discoveries that we can only begin to imagine."

The system will deliver sustained performance of more than one petaflop on many real-world scientific and engineering applications. A petaflop is computing parlance for 1 quadrillion calculations per second.


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IBM finalises petascale HPC system contract


The NCSA says Blue Waters will be first supercomputer complex capable of delivering sustained petascale performance running scientific and engineering applications. In addition to having petaflops number-crunching power, Blue Waters will feature more than a petabyte of memory and over 10 petabytes of disk storage. All of its memory and disk storage will be globally accessible by all processors, promising faster high performance computing (HPC). Did we mention that this monster will have 200,000 processor cores?

Funded by a $208 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Blue Waters HPC facility is expected to begin operations in 2011.

The Blue Waters system will be constructed by IBM using its PERCS technology developed for the High Productivity Computing Systems project that's sponsored by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is the American military-industrial complex combination shadowy think tank, experimental skunk works and sugar daddy that sponsored the early development research that led to what we now call the Internet.



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NCSA to add 47 teraflops of compute power with new heterogeneous system


Installation has begun on a new computational resource at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Lincoln will deliver peak performance of 47.5 teraflops and is designed to push the envelope in the use of heterogeneous processors for scientific computing. The system is expected to be online in October, bringing NCSA's total computational resources to nearly 155 teraflops.

Lincoln will consist of 192 compute nodes (Dell PowerEdge 1950 III dual-socket nodes with quad-core Intel Harpertown 2.33GHz processors and 16GB of memory) and 96 NVIDIA Tesla S1070 accelerator units. Each Tesla unit provides 345.6 gigaflops of double-precision performance and 16GB of memory.

Lincoln's InfiniBand interconnect fabric will be linked to the interconnect fabric of Abe, the 89-teraflop cluster that is currently NCSA's largest resource. This will enable certain applications to run across the entire complex, providing a peak "Abe Lincoln" performance of 136 teraflops.


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IBM: Envisioning the world's fastest supercomputer


IBM will release a radical new chip next year that will go into a University of Illinois supercomputer in a quest to build what may become the world's fastest supercomputer.

Though not aspiring to artificial intelligence, the IBM Blue Waters project supercomputer, like the HAL 9000 series, will be able to do massively complex calculations in an instant and, like HAL, be built in Urbana-Champaign. It is being housed in a special building on the Urbana-Champaign campus specifically for the computer that will theoretically be capable of achieving 10 petaflops, about 10 times as fast as the fastest supercomputer today.

As processor designs go, the upcoming Blue Waters' IBM Power7 processor--due in the first half of 2010--is a big step for IBM: the processor integrates the features of a chip used in its "Roadrunner" supercomputer, which has often been ranked as the fastest supercomputer in the world. Power7 fuses the flagship Power chip design with key technology from a separate "Cell" processor--the latter was part of IBM's Roadrunner system at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to Bradley McCredie, an IBM Fellow in the Systems and Technology Group.

"We took some of that genetic material from the Cell program--ways to do floating point (calculations)--and embedded that right into the Power7 core," McCredie said in an interview with CNET.

But that's not the only thing that makes the Power7 chip special. It integrates eight processing cores in one chip package and each core can execute four tasks--called "threads"--turning an individual chip into a virtual 32-core processor. As a yardstick, Intel's high-end Xeon processors typically have two threads per processing core.


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Over the next few years, the Power7-based system will start to come into its own at the high end, thanks in no small part to the HPCS DARPA program which helped to drive IBM's Power roadmap into the multi-petaflop domain.

The first commercial Power7-based servers will start shipping in the first half of 2010, but its big HPC debut will be in 2011, when the Blue Waters supercomputer boots up at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

That machine is aiming at 10 petaflops, which is about five time the performance of ORNL's Jaguar, the current supercomputing champ. When Blue Waters deploys it may not be the fastest supercomputer in the world, although it will surely be among the top systems.


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IBM Pulls Out of Supercomputer Contract


Three years after being appointed, IBM has unexpectedly terminated a multimillion-dollar contract with a federal research agency to deliver a one-petaflop supercomputer next year.

With approximately $208 million in grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Illinois-based National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) had contracted IBM in 2008 to build a sustained one-petaflop computer for U.S. scientists and researchers by 2012, as part of the Blue Waters Project.

But according to a joint statement on the NCSA's website, "The innovative technology that IBM ultimately developed was more complex and required significantly increased financial and technical support by IBM beyond its original expectations."

"NCSA and IBM worked closely on various proposals to retain IBM's participation in the project but could not come to a mutually agreed-on plan concerning the path forward."


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Even with IBM pulling out of the Blue Waters project here, industry analysts say the leading-edge supercomputer could very well go on with another vendor — but quite possibly at a higher cost, and perhaps missing its fall 2012 deadline.

The building, with its advanced water cooling system — expected to become an industry standard — as well as a massive electrical infrastructure, has been largely completed for about a year, but on Aug. 6 IBM announced tersely that it was pulling out of the project and would return the $30 million it has been paid for its powerful servers.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois is the leader in a consortium of institutions that want to share the enormous sustained 1 petaflop (a thousand trillion floating point operations per second) computing power.

The state of Illinois would no longer have the money to bail out an expensive project, he said, and things aren't any better at IBM.

Also, other costs were hard to control, he said.

"In order to reach their goal, very significant investments had to made in cooling and energy efficiency," he said.

"In my mind, it was clear from the beginning that the architecture NCSA had chosen was well-suited, but came with a cost. If you really want sustained petaflop computing, you need powerful memory, powerful interconnects, lots of electrical power."

Achieving supremacy became an expensive goal.

"The contract went bad," Morgan believes, "because IBM can't afford to lose the money; it's not going to use Blue Waters as a loss leader."


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The heyday of computers like Blue Waters—those as big as football fields—may soon be over, some scientists argue. Most machines to come may use a system that works more like a search engine, distributing computational problems among processors distributed across a broad physical network, often called a cloud.

That's the focus of Dan Reed, vice president for technology, policy, and strategy at Microsoft Research, who calls this research area the next generation of cloud computing.

"If you look at the insights we have gleaned from massive search engines and cloud infrastructure, those things are really bigger than any of the supercomputers that have been built before," he says.


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Cray Supercomputer Will Include AMD 'Interlagos' Chips, Nvidia GPUs


Cray will take over from IBM the project to build a supercomputer at the University of Illinois, the second significant federally funded project to feature the system maker’s technology.

Cray officials on Nov. 14 announced that the company will build the supercomputer at the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) that will be installed over the first three quarters of 2012. The supercomputer will form the basis for the National Science Foundation’s Blue Waters project, which calls for building a system that will offer a sustained performance of 1 petaflop (quadrillion floating point operations per second) and be used for a variety of research and engineering workloads.

The supercomputer will comprise a Cray XE6 system and the company’s new XK6 hybrid supercomputer, which features Advanced Micro Devices new 16-core Operaton 6200 Interlagos processors and Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia. The system will offer the sustained performance of 1 petaflop and a peak performance of 11.6 petaflops, according to Cray.


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The National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the US is rolling out a storage infrastructure that will include 380 petabytes of magnetic tape capacity and 25 petabytes of online disk storage made up by 17,000 SATA drives.

The massive storage infrastructure is designed to support of one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, called Blue Waters. Commissioned by the National Science Foundation (NFS), Blue Waters is expected to have a peak performance of 11.5 petaflops, though the specification given by the NFS is for it to offer 1 petaflop of sustained computing power for applications.

The supercomputer will be made up of more than 235 Cray XE6 cabinets using 380,000 AMD Opteron 6200 Series x82 processors and more than 30 cabinets of a future version of the recently announced Cray XK6 supercomputer with 3,000 NVIDIA GPUs. The system will include 1.5PB of aggregate memory from 190,000 memory DIMMs.

In support of all that computing power, the NCSA is deploying 25PB of disk storage using Cray Sonexion storage systems. Sonexion is a rebranding of Zyratex storage arrays. The system offers up to 1TBps of aggregate bandwidth over a 40Gbps Ethernet from Extreme Networks.


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