GOVERNMENT

New data-analysis system to speed research in science, energy, national security: Cray announced that the Department of Energy's (DOE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has taken delivery of the first-of-its-kind Cray XMT supercomputer designed for data intensive computing research. The Cray XMT system has a unique "massively multithreaded" architecture and large global memory that is configured for applications, such as data discovery, business intelligence, bioinformatics and power grid analysis, that require access to terabytes of data arranged in an unpredictable manner. The random and unpredictable data access required by these efforts has meant that they typically do not run well on conventional computer systems, where performance is determined mainly by the speed at which the memory can deliver information to the microprocessor. In many large-scale applications of this kind, the processor is idle 80 to 90 percent of the time while waiting for data from memory. The Cray XMT system is built to overcome memory bottlenecks with each processor able to handle 128 independent threads. The entire system is scalable to hundreds of thousands of threads -- portions of a program that can run independently of and concurrently with other portions of the program -- in shared memory. "The result is a system that is ideal for data-intensive computing and other applications with high levels of irregular memory access," said PNNL scientist Jarek Nieplocha. "The Cray XMT system will offer PNNL the potential to substantially accelerate data analysis and predictive analytics for many of our clients' complex challenges in energy, national security and fundamental science," said Moe Khaleel, director of computational sciences and mathematics at PNNL. "I expect the new system will provide researchers with levels of performance for data analysis that they have never achieved before." For example, PNNL researchers and colleagues at Cray have obtained promising results in testing the massively multithreaded architecture on several PNNL-developed applications, including one that constantly monitors the state of the power grid. "Electrical power grid modeling and analysis are critical to DOE," Nieplocha said, noting that "speedups achieved on a developmental system at Cray's lab in Seattle were better than ever reported for this application." "Cray has traditionally led the supercomputer market with machines designed for simulation; with the Cray XMT, we are entering into the data analysis and network discovery market," said Jan Silverman, Cray senior vice president of corporate strategy and business development. "We're excited that PNNL's innovative researchers will be developing software to take advantage of the unique features of the Cray XMT to solve a broad range of important problems that could not have been efficiently solved before." The system also will be available to researchers at Washington State University (WSU), increasing opportunities for collaborative science and discovery. "This system represents a fundamentally new computer architecture for solving grand challenge problems," said Behrooz Shirazi, director of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at WSU. "The Cray XMT will be a catalyst for fostering and expanding cooperation among the researchers at PNNL, Cray and WSU." The PNNL Cray XMT supercomputer is an early-release system installed as part of a collaboration between Cray and PNNL to explore a variety of new application areas on this innovative system. It is scheduled to be upgraded to a production-level system in 2008. The supercomputer is installed in the Applied Process Engineering Laboratory, a user facility located near PNNL's campus in Richland, Wash.