Intel and SGI are working to improve the system at NASAs Ames Research Center.NASA is preparing to rocket its research supercomputer into the petaflop era.
The space agency has signed an agreement with Intel and SGI to update its supercomputer at
the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. NASA hopes the
project, dubbed Pleiades, will produce a supercomputer capable of
breaking the petaflop mark1 quadrillion calculations per secondby
2009.
By 2012, SGI, Intel and NASA plan to increase the performance to 10 petaflops.
The news that NASA and its partners are planning to build a machine
that will first break and then move past the petaflop mark has become a
common refrain in the supercomputer industry within just the last year.
Both Sun Microsystems and IBM have
each announced plans to build new supercomputers that pass the petaflop
mark. Cray, one of the worlds best-known supercomputer companies, is
also working toward that goal.
Its possible the first petaflop machines could enter the Top 500
supercomputer list in June, when the organization that ranks these
machines updates the list for the first time since November. IBM and
its BlueGene/L system at the Department of Energys Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory currently hold the top spot with a maximum
performance of 478.2 teraflops.
Right now, the NASA supercomputer at Ames, called Columbia, ranks 20th
on the list, with a performance of 51.9 teraflops. The new system, with
the improvements that Intel and SGI are planning, should offer 16 times
more computing power than the current Columbia system.
To show how far the industry has gone since the Columbia system was
first installed, the machine originally ranked second on the Top 500
when it debuted in 2004 with the same performance of 51.9 teraflops, or
51.9 trillion calculations per second. Since then, Columbia has tumbled
down the list as IBM began pushing the limits with its line of BlueGene
systems.
SGI first built the NASA supercomputer in 2004.
That system, which uses more than 10,000 processors, is built on
Intels Itanium architecture. The May 7 announcement from Intel and SGI
did not indicate if the new system would continue to use the Itanium
processors or switch to Intels x86 processors.
Earlier this month, Intel announced that it had signed an agreement with Cray to use its x86 processors with that companys supercomputers. The
agreement, the first between Intel and Cray, shows the increasing
acceptance of x86 processors within the field of high-performance
computing (HPC) and Intels desire to chase after a market that had
been dominated by highly specialized processors or chips that were
built with IBMs Power microarchitecture.
With its next-generation architectureNehalemIntel will introduce a
technology called QuickPath, a high-speed, chip-to-chip interconnect
that should create a low-latency way to connect thousands of processors
together inside supercomputers and HPC machines.
The announcement from NASA was not the only supercomputer news this
week. On May 6, Dell announced it had built a new supercomputer on the
campus of Purdue University. The cluster system, called Steele, is
made up of 812 PowerEdge 1950 nodes. Each node supports two, quad-core
Intel Xeon processors, which should allow for a peak performance of 60
teraflops.
While not as prolific as IBM or Hewlett-Packard, Dell has 24
supercomputers listed within the Top 500, and the 60 teraflop
performance of the Purdue machine would place it within the Top 20. For
its part, SGI has 22 machines listed on the Top 500, including one that
breaks 100 teraflops of performance.