RETAIL

The Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and SGI have established a collaboration that will create the world's first 128-way Linux(r) box at the laboratory for use in computational sciences and engineering. The supercomputer will consist of 128 next-generation Intel(r) Itanium(tm) Family Processors code-named Madison running the Linux operating system in a single global shared memory architecture. The 128-way Linux system is an enhancement of the new SGI(r) Altix(r) 3000 server, a high-performance computing system based on the Linux operating system. This scaled up system, which is scheduled to be delivered this summer, will be capable of calculating 768 billion floating point operations per second, with high performance access to all memory from any processor. PNNL and SGI will collaborate in evaluating and running this system with a single 128-processor Linux kernel. The principle function of this Altix 3000 system will be PNNL's on-going research mission. PNNL scientists will employ the system in studies related to the laboratory's missions in fundamental sciences, environmental quality, energy resources, and national security. Additionally, PNNL scientists will collaborate with SGI to investigate combining programmable elements such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays with SGI's global shared memory architecture to provide scalable reconfigurable computing. "With this purchase, PNNL continues its leadership in establishing and applying the value of Linux operating systems in high-performance scientific computing," said Scott Studham, group lead for the Molecular Sciences Computing Facility's operations at PNNL. "The SGI system will complement the new Linux OS-based system we recently acquired from Hewlett Packard. Both systems will run Intel Itanium 2 processors, which have demonstrated their ability to set new levels of performance on our computational codes." According to Dave Parry, senior vice president and general manager, Server and Platform Group, SGI, "We are excited to work with PNNL to create the world's highest performance shared memory Linux system. Our collaboration in scalable reconfigurable computing will help us to understand how algorithm acceleration could provide significant performance increases on codes developed through the Department of Energy's Office of Science." The SGI Altix 3000 system from SGI builds on a family of cache-coherent, single-system, shared-memory, symmetric-multiprocessing systems first productized with the SGI Origin(r) 2000 and SGI Onyx(r)2 systems, and followed by the SGI Origin 3000 and SGI Onyx 3000 line of supercomputers. The Altix architecture is different from others, with its tightly coupled, modular efficiently organized pool of shared resources combined in a flexible environment. Integrating existing computational tools and programs into the Altix system will provide PNNL scientists with enhanced capabilities. PNNL will port to the new SGI Altix the Global Array Toolkit, which provides an efficient and portable "shared-memory" programming interface for distributed-memory computers, and also NWChem, a computational chemistry package designed to run on high-performance parallel supercomputers. Both of these software products were developed by PNNL scientists conducting research in the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a DOE user facility at PNNL. In addition, the system will provide a testing site for porting Lustre, an open-source next-generation distributed file system being developed by Cluster Filesystem Inc.