NCSA NEWS

NCSA's SGI Origin2000 Array Increases to 1024 Processors

released March 4, 1999

 

Contact Information
Karen Green
Public Information Officer
kareng@ncsa.uiuc.edu
217.265.0748 phone
217.265.0460 fax

Champaign, IL -- The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has taken delivery of two more 128-processor Silicon Graphics^® Origin2000^TM supercomputers, bringing the parallel computing power available to the national academic user community to a new level. The center's 1024-processor Origin^TM array, on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is now the largest university-based supercomputer in the United States.

The two new Origin systems will be used exclusively for capability computing "superjobs" requiring dedicated use of the Origin for an extended period. NCSA's previous 768 Origin processors provide peer reviewed access to supercomputing power for nearly 600 national users per month from more than 200 universities. However, because of the large number of users competing for the processors, dedicated blocks of time on the Origin could only be provided infrequently, even though such large jobs can accomplish breakthrough science.

An excellent example of what capability computing can accomplish was the recent series of real-time, high-resolution numerical weather forecasts made in January at NCSA by a team from the University of Oklahoma's Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS), directed by Kelvin Droegemeier. The real-time nature of the job meant the work of Droegemeier's team could not previously be scheduled into the Origin queues like smaller jobs. Instead, a 128-processor Origin was dedicated for use by Droegemeier's team for nearly two weeks.

"We were able to run our application on the Origin at about twice the speed per node as we did last year on the SGI Cray T3E. This continual improvement in performance from SGI supercomputers is what allows us to keep attacking more difficult problems," said Droegemeier. "We needed dedicated high-end computing power to produce forecasts much faster than the real weather evolves. The Cray J90 machine at Oklahoma University was very useful for application development for our high-resolution forecast codes. The NCSA dedicated Origin then gave us the ability to move from the development to the real time production environment."

Droegemeier also has big plans for using the Origin to predict storms this spring. For about seven weeks, his team will use a 128-processor Origin at NCSA to create high-resolution forecasts in localized areas across the eastern two-thirds of the country. The use of the Origin will not be contiguous, but it will be dedicated at specified times each day during the entire seven weeks. Droegemeier also hopes to work out a plan that will allow his team to do spur-of-the-moment forecasts when major storms are expected.

"What we did in January was really a preview of what we plan to do this spring," he said. "We will be using data from eight Doppler radars instead of one-which has never been done before. What we are doing is prototyping a system of forecasting that is five or more years beyond current operational capabilities."

With the success of Droegemeier's run, and several previous experiments, NCSA decided to acquire two new 128-processor Origins and exclusively dedicate them to such important capability computing projects. This will triple the amount of time NCSA can make available for high-end capability computing. This increase in capability computing will be allocated by the National Resource Allocation Committee -- the joint computing allocations board for large projects serving the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure program, which includes the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure.

"The ability to dedicate an entire 128-processor Origin2000 to a single project for a week or more is a major step forward in our ability to meet the nation's capability computing needs," said Larry Smarr, director of NCSA and the Alliance. "We have applications running at NCSA that have demonstrated the ability to run 128-way parallel in disciplines as diverse as cosmology, astrophysics, earth sciences, fluid dynamics, engineering, computer science, biology, chemistry, materials science, elementary particles, and industrial problems. Each of these is a candidate for the new dedicated machines."

To further the ability of computational scientists and engineers to carry out large scale projects, the Alliance and Silicon Graphics, Inc. will conduct a joint workshop this spring on Origin2000 capability computing. The workshop will be held at NCSA on May 3 and 4. It will be one of the few workshops ever held which will focus exclusively on improving high-end applications so they can be used to their fullest capacity on a new supercomputer architecture. The Distributed Shared Memory of the Origin2000 is the next generation of computer architecture beyond the Massively Parallel computers, such as the Thinking Machines CM-5, the Silicon Graphics Cray T3E^TM, and the IBM SP. DSM machines combine large parallelism with huge shared memories. The goal of the workshop is to optimize a wide variety of disciplinary applications to take full advantage of the advanced capabilities of the Origin2000.

"NCSA users continue to develop the applications that require hardware solutions no one else can deliver," said John R. "Beau" Vrolyk, senior vice president, Computer Systems Business Unit, Silicon Graphics. "What's particularly exciting about our partnership with NCSA is that these machines aren't just being used for the scientific breakthroughs that have been the hallmark of our past relationship, but also for real-world code for business applications. With NCSA, we will continue to produce commercial successes like this as part of our ongoing commitment to supercomputing."

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the leading-edge site for the National Computational Science Alliance. NCSA is a leader in the development and deployment of cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking and information technologies. The National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners and other federal agencies fund NCSA.

The National Computational Science Alliance is a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century and includes more than 50 academic, government and industry research partners from across the United States. The Alliance is one of two partnerships funded by the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, and receives cost-sharing at partner institutions. NSF also supports the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

 

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