January 24, 2013 
Lab expects PNNL-based supercomputer to rank in world's top 20 fastest machines
RICHLAND, Wash. - A new supercomputer expected to rank among the world's fastest machines will be ready to run computationally intense climate and biological simulations along with other scientific programs this summer. This computational work will aid research in climate and environmental science, chemical processes, biology-based fuels that can replace fossil fuels, new materials for energy applications and more.
Chosen by a competitive process, Atipa Technologies in Lawrence, Kan., will provide the machine to EMSL, the D.O.E.'s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory. EMSL is a national user facility on DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's campus that provides experimental and high performance computing capabilities to enable users to address environmental and energy challenges through molecular-level theory and experiment. It is also home to the new supercomputer's predecessor, Chinook. As a national user facility resource, the new system will be accessible to scientists everywhere,who will be able to apply on a competitive basis to use it. Currently, about 400 scientists use Chinook.
"We're developing a supercomputer that will aid energy, environment and basic science missions important to DOE," said PNNL computational scientist Bill Shelton, the associate director at EMSL who manages high performance computing. "Enhanced computing power will benefit our users who conduct experiments and want to verify them with modeling. Integrating computational theory with experiment is critical to accelerating scientific discovery."
Funded by DOE's Office of Science, the new $17 million machine will likely peak at 3.4 quadrillion - 3.4 million billion - calculations per 2nd and be in excess of 20 times faster than the four-year-old Chinook. The new supercomputer's capacity and speed are expected to rank it among the world's top 20 fastest machines when it comes online. Peaking at 3.4 petaflops, the new computer will be able to do in one hour what would take a typical laptop in excess of 20 years to do.
Atipa Technologies has been providing high performance computers to D.O.E. and its labs for in excess of a decade.
"We're excited to have the opportunity to provide the new supercomputer with a theoretical peak performance of 3.38 petaflops and 2.7 petabytes of usable storage. It will be built and deployed by Atipa Technologies in collaboration with Supermicro," said Mike Zheng, president of Atipa Technologies.
As EMSL's flagship high performance computer, researchers from around the world will be able to use it. The EMSL team designed it for researchers who typically need resources of this scale but don't generally have access to such a powerful computer. This wide availability makes it stand out from other supercomputers.
"Its uniqueness is that it will be optimally configured for climate and chemistry simulations and biological analyses," said Shelton.
For example, the new machine will offer added speed for improved climate models. "The new computer provides a wonderful opportunity for climate scientists to get more work done and get each simulation done more quickly," said PNNL climate scientist Phil Rasch. "It is a huge jump in the computing power accessible to us."
And it will produce more details about how organisms work. "I'm excited because with the amount of data researchers are generating in biology, this supercomputer will open up new avenues for our users," said EMSL biology science lead Scott Baker. "More computing power is like having more pixels in a picture. We'll be able to look at proteins and complex biological interactions more realistically. This will allow us to better understand and control organisms like microbes so that we can develop new renewable fuels."
The design's 196,000 processing units are Intel processors combined with Intel Phi many integrated core (MIC) accelerator cards. The accelerator cards will ratchet up the power. They work with the conventional processors and memory and allow up to 120 extra calculations per node to be performed simultaneously rather than one at a time. (Anyone with a graphics card in their personal computer has taken advantage of a hardware accelerator.)
The system's 23,000 Intel processors have 184,000 gigabytes (184,000 billion bytes) of memory available, about 4 times as much memory per processor as other supercomputers. The additional memory will allow scientists to use the processors more efficiently for biology, climate research, chemistry and materials science.
Atipa will deliver the computer's components by July 2013 and assemble it at EMSL. The EMSL team will spend a few months installing and configuring the system and getting it up to speed. They expect to have it running for national and international researchers in October 2013. In the meantime, EMSL will be sponsoring a naming contest among EMSL users and friends.
The New Supercomputer's Fast Facts:
- Theoretical peak processing speed of 3.4 petaflops
- 42 racks
- 195,840 cores
- 1440 compute nodes with conventional processors and Intel Xeon Phi "MIC" accelerators
- 128 GB memory per node
- FDR Infiniband network
- 2.7 petabyte shared parallel filesystem (60 gigabytes per 2nd read/write)
- Working reference: HPCS4A
DOE's Office of Science is the single biggest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit the Office of Science website.
Located in America's heartland in Lawrence, Kansas, Atipa Technologies is the High Performance Computing division of Microtech Computers and has been building Linux-based HPC clusters for well over a decade. A privately-held company, Atipa has developed comprehensive Linux solutions for diverse enterprises, academic research labs and D.O.E. research organizations. Over the years, Atipa has had 14 supercomputers in the Top500 and 4 supercomputers in the Green500.
Tags: Computational Science, EMSL, Supercomputer
EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Lab, is a national scientific user facility sponsored by the D.O.E.'s Office of Science. Located at Pacific Northwest National Lab in Richland, Wash., EMSL offers an open, collaborative environment for scientific discovery to researchers around the world. Its integrated computational and experimental resources enable researchers to realize important scientific insights and create new technologies. Follow EMSL on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Interdisciplinary teams at Pacific Northwest National Lab address many of America's most pressing issues in energy, the environment and national security through advances in basic and applied science. PNNL employs 4,500 staff, has an yearly budget of nearly $1 billion, and has been managed for the D.O.E. by Ohio-based Battelle since the laboratory's inception in 1965. For more information, visit the PNNL News Center, or follow PNNL on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
