APPLICATIONS

Cray Inc. today announced that under the "Red Storm" contract, Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia), part of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), will expand its Cray-built supercomputer to peak performance of more than 50 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) from its current 40-teraflop capacity in 2006. "Red Storm is enabling us to carry out unprecedented simulations. For example, we are able to resolve climate calculations at 1/10 of a degree, which is well beyond the current state of the art. We are able to carry out an order-of-magnitude larger simulations, an order-of-magnitude faster than on any of our previous capability systems," said Bill Camp, Director of Computation, Computers, Information and Mathematics at Sandia National Laboratories. "The added capacity will allow us to undertake new and more complex research and achieve even greater productivity gains. Our partnership with Cray to design and deploy an extremely powerful, highly efficient new supercomputer has met our initial expectations and will soon take another step forward." The expanded, 52-teraflop Red Storm supercomputer will feature 14,348 AMD Opteron™ processors, more than 72 terabytes per second of system memory bandwidth, more than 125 terabytes per second of sustained aggregate interconnect bandwidth, and 400 terabytes of disk storage. The current 40-teraflop Red Storm supercomputer has exceeded expectations by performing more than seven times faster than Sandia's previous ASCI Red supercomputer on real-world applications. Sandia expects to achieve further performance gains with its expansion to a 52-teraflop capacity. "Sandia has achieved exceptional performance results at record scale since deploying the Red Storm system, running key applications across 10,000 processors or more. Other contemporary HPC systems aren't designed to efficiently run demanding applications at this scale," said Cray Chief Technology Officer Steve Scott. "Customers who are using our new Cray XT3™ product, which is based on the Red Storm architecture, are also achieving breakthrough results at record scale." Red Storm achieved higher performance than the Earth Simulator on the high-performance Linpack test. Sandia ran the benchmark on the full 10,848-processor Red Storm system at a sustained speed of 36.19 teraflops to surpass the Earth Simulator's current published performance of 35.86 teraflops. Red Storm's Linpack efficiency is higher than for Blue Gene/L, the currently fastest HPC system on Linpack. The Red Storm system enables DOE scientists and engineers to perform advanced modeling and simulations of complex problems involved in supporting the nation's nuclear weapons program. Sandia also makes a secure portion of the supercomputer available for DOE non-classified scientific research across a spectrum of disciplines. Challenging problems already running in production mode at large scale on Sandia's Red Storm supercomputer include: -- Fire Safety. Sandia ran its Fuego (Spanish: fire) code at unprecedented resolution to simulate a so-called object in crosswind. In the near term, Sandia will use this application to certify its new fire test facility. Later, Sandia will use Fuego simulations to help ensure the safety of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. Researchers ran the object-in-wind simulation, involving 150 million degrees of freedom, for 65 hours on 2,048 Red Storm processors. -- Asteroid Explosion. Running the widely used CTH production code on Red Storm, Sandia simulated a hypothetical explosion of the Golevka asteroid with new precision. Golevka has been an object of special interest since 2003, when NASA scientists discovered the asteroid's course had changed. This opened possibilities for predicting asteroids' paths and learning how to deflect any that might be headed for Earth. Sandia's half-second, billion-cell simulation of a 10-megaton explosion at Golevka's center took 12 hours to run on 7,200 processors of Red Storm. -- Ocean Climate. Sandia researchers have been running the well-known Parallel Ocean Program (POP) code from Los Alamos National Laboratory on 10,000 processors of the Red Storm system to produce a 10-year simulation of global ocean circulation, a crucial element in climate modeling. The superhigh-resolution simulation uses average grid spacing of 10 kilometers (1/10 of a degree) and 345 million grid points. -- Atmospheric Climate. Sandia ran the Sandia-NCAR Spectral Element Atmospheric Model (SEAM), coupled with the Community Atmospheric Model (CAM), on 10,000 processors of Red Storm for 36 hours to simulate 20 days. The billion-grid-point simulation of the entire Earth used an average grid spacing of 13 kilometers. Performance scaled efficiently to the 10,000 processors tried so far. According to Cray President and CEO Peter Ungaro, "Our partnership with Sandia combines their leadership in operating some of the world's most successful massively parallel processing (MPP) systems, and Cray's expertise in designing and delivering the most capable supercomputers on the planet. We are already testing capabilities for scaling Red Storm and our related Cray XT3 systems to over 100 teraflops of performance while preserving the kind of system balance and capability that simply can't be achieved with cluster technology today."