ACADEMIA

Intel Corporation, system manufacturer California Digital and the University of California at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) today announced they are building one of the world's most powerful supercomputers. The supercomputer project, codenamed "Thunder," uses nearly 4,000 Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors. Thunder is expected to be complete in January. "By utilizing the high floating-point performance of Itanium 2 processors in open standards-based systems for high-end computing, this supercomputer will be designed and deployed in only five months," said Richard Dracott, general manager of marketing and planning for Intel's Enterprise Platforms Group. "Previous systems of this size and capability often took years to deploy." With a performance of more than 20 teraFLOP/s (trillions of floating point operations per second), Thunder will provide a world-class production resource to researchers working in areas supporting LLNL national security activities, including materials science, structural mechanics, electromagnetics, atmospheric and ocean science, seismology, biology, and magnetic and inertial confinement fusion. "Thunder will serve a critical role supporting the Lab's mission to drive unclassified science and technology for multiple program areas," said Hal Graboske, LLNL deputy director of science and technology. "Intel Itanium 2 processors address capacity and capability issues facing national security and science programs, with a long-term goal to develop a viable path to petaFLOP/s-scale computing." "High-performance computing has always been crucial to our Stockpile Stewardship Program work, and it is especially important for our key materials science applications," said Bruce Goodwin, head of the Laboratory's Defense and Nuclear Technologies Directorate. "The Laboratory looks forward to the increased horsepower that the Thunder system will provide. The cluster's software environment benefits from Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASCI) investments. What we learn from this system will in turn benefit our ASCI program as it seeks future low-cost capacity and capability solutions." Thunder features 960 nodes, each using four Intel Itanium 2 processors operating at 1.4 GHz with 4MB level-three (L3) cache, 8 GB of memory and 73 GB UltraSCSI320 local disk. The systems include Intel(R) Gigabit Ethernet Controllers for cluster management, the Intel(R) PRO/1000 MT Dual Port Server Adapter to reduce bottlenecks and improve availability, and the Intel(R) E8870 Chipset, which is optimized for the Intel Itanium 2 processor to provide greater performance and scalability, and enhanced error detection, correction and containment. Intel(R) Solution Services will provide expertise in optimization to help Thunder achieve maximum performance. The system will have more than 190 TB of global disk space. According to the 22nd TOP500 list of supercomputers, Intel Itanium processor family-based systems account for 32 of the 500 most powerful computers in the world, an increase of 68 percent in six months**. Thunder is expected to achieve second place on the next TOP500 List when it is published in June, and the system will be designed for easy expansion. LLNL has two Intel-based systems ranked seventh and 10th on the TOP500 list. The TOP500 project was started in 1993 to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing. Twice a year, a list of the sites operating the 500 most powerful computer systems is assembled and released.