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U.S. supercomputing efforts are making up for the country's earlier loss of the speed title to the Japanese Earth Simulator, with two new systems poised to garner top spots on the Top500 Supercomputer list due out next week.
The U.S. Department of Energy this week announced that the IBM (NYSE: IBM) BlueGene/L system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved record-breaking performance of 70.72 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops), almost double the speed of Japan's Earth Simulator, made by NEC (Nasdaq: NIPNY), which has led the Top500 list for two years with a top speed of 35.86 teraflops.
The BlueGene/L news came just one week after NASA announced its SGI Columbia system, which achieved a previously unprecedented speed of 42.7 teraflops.
One-Two Super Punch
Erich Strohmaier, co-compiler and editor of the Top500 Supercomputer Site list, told TechNewsWorld that the NEC Earth Simulator had taken U.S. supercomputer scientists by surprise, but that with advancing technology -- in particular, more and faster processors and more efficient interconnection -- the U.S. had made up the difference.
"The Earth Simulator announced three years ago was a bit of a shock," Strohmaier said. "It took U.S. researchers awhile to catch up, but with the use of different technologies, they have caught up."
While he would not discuss who would hold the top spot on the new list, Strohmaier said that both the BlueGene/L and the Columbia system -- already installed and in use at the NASA Ames Research Center -- had established claims for top spots on the list, which will be announced early next week.
Strohmaier also indicated that the big boosts in speed and performance among supercomputers is likely to continue.
"We see exponential growth a little faster than Moore's Law," he said referring to the Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) founder's formula for doubled processor performance every 18 months. "It's possible because these systems use more processors along with faster processors."
Bigger BlueGene
In announcing the latest BlueGene/L capabilities, U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham said in a statement that the system would reduce the time-to-solution for complex problems including nuclear weapons analysis and applied scientific research.
Tilak Agerwala, IBM Research's vice president of systems, called BlueGene's 70 teraflop performance "a milestone." He highlighted the collaboration with LLNL and the research possibilities of the system.
"It is very significant that BlueGene has achieved this big number," Agerwala told TechNewsWorld.
He also indicated the supercomputer "leapfrogging" will likely continue. IBM, he said, is hoping to achieve a 300 teraflop system with LLNL next year.
Both the BlueGene/L announcement this week and the Columbia announcement last week centered on supercomputer systems that had not yet been put to their full potential use.
Agerwala indicated that the BlueGene/L had achieved the 70 teraflop mark using only about one-quarter of the final machine.
Columbia -- a cluster of 20 SGI machines with 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 processors -- achieved its speed of 42.7 teraflops using only 16 of the cluster's 20 installed systems.
Speed Survives
Experts indicated they expect the progress in supercomputing to go on, even in the face of increasing challenges on matters of heat, power, manageability and other factors.
"We see it continuing," Strohmaier said, referring to programs such as DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems program. "Their goal is to basically push the speed of performance at the rate it has been in the past."
IBM's Agerwala said that although the growth of processor performance and frequency is slowing down -- mainly because of power constraints -- researchers are still pushing ahead.
"I expect at the system level, performance will continue to grow rapidly," Agerwala said. "You just have to do careful integration between the silicon devices and the system you support."
Agerwala said the use of low-energy, low-power processors and system-on-a-chip technology in BlueGene/L, for example, would allow it to continue gaining in speed.
"We've integrated it all together in innovative ways to get a balanced
system design," he said. "Then we can scale on the large problems. I see
BlueGene continuing to scale effectively on some very interesting problems."
