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A decade of supercomputing paves way to future
After ten years and three different supercomputer systems, IBM delivers ASC Purple to the US government, a supercomputer capable of 100 Teraflops. The IBM and government partnership has had a profound effect on the computing industry and society. And that’s just the beginning.
This week, the first of 25 trucks loaded with the IBM ASC Purple supercomputer will leave Poughkeepsie, NY and head towards their final destination – Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – where the supercomputer will ultimately begin its important task of safeguarding the United States nuclear stockpile.
The delivery concludes a 10-year multi-step program initiated by the US Department of Energy to build, with industry, a supercomputer capable of 100 Teraflops – the estimated level of computational capability needed to conduct nuclear simulations on a computer instead of with real-world testing. One Teraflop represents 1 trillion calculations per second.
At the time it was conceived, ASCI represented an increase of two orders of magnitude in processing capability. "It was considered a moon-shoot, an undertaking of what was believed to be insurmountable challenges," said Jay Pecce, overall ASCI program manager in the IBM Public Sector. "Nothing this ambitious had ever been done before."
"The ASC Purple project not only made its deliveries on schedule, it often exceeded its performance commitments," said Sohel Saiyed, program director, ASC development. "This was team IBM at its best."
Project helped usher in new computer technologies, fields of study
Photo of ASCPurple being loaded on a truck in POK
Part of ASC Purple is loaded on a truck in Poughkeepsie, NY
This project, in which hundreds of IBMers have been involved, has had a tremendous effect upon the computer industry and in many ways our society as a whole. It has helped usher in new technologies that both spurred new markets or forever changed old ones.
One of the key advances was the development of processor interconnect technology. Because processor speed increases alone could not meet the computing challenge, engineers developed this technology to allow thousands of processors to work on the same problem at once. Related software was developed to allow those thousands of processors to write data to a single file.
These innovations have allowed fundamental changes in science and business. The automotive industry now uses sophisticated simulations to build and design safer cars – virtually. Oil companies use modeling of the earth's geologic layers to pinpoint more likely sources of oil to reduce unneeded drilling. Weather forecasting has been improved – believe it or not. Boeing has even designed an entire virtual aircraft on a computer and brought it to market without ever building a prototype.
Opened new avenues of drug discovery, cancer research
A photo of ASC Purple being assembled
Another of ASC Purple's many parts being assembled at Poughkeepsie, NY.
Great strides have been made in genomic research, drug discovery and cancer research and new markets have opened up under these areas. Don Grice, distinguished engineer who has worked on the project for ten years, recalls how Cornell Medical Center redesigned the shape of their hip implant by borrowing an IBM supercomputer during an industry tradeshow.
IBM’s own eServer p575, now in heavy use by academia and industry, wasn’t even on the drawing board until the final phase of the ASCI contract.
ASCI, now known as ASC, with its series of computing milestones, injected a competitive spirit in the supercomputing industry. Companies including IBM, Intel, Cray, SGI, and others fought to win incremental government bids that offered both important research dollars as well as bragging rights to the "world’s fastest supercomputer." The publicity, enthusiasm and technical know-how spilled over into and influenced research fields in academia and private companies far beyond the project itself.
Competition changed the computer industry players, too
Over the course of the 10 year project, the competitive landscape has changed significantly. A variety of market forces from dramatic price/performance of processors and disk storage to innovative research has reshaped the field.
In 1996, the biggest players in the Top500 supercomputer listed Cray, SGI, IBM and Fujitsu. Hitachi held the top spot on the list with an installation at the University of Japan. In fact, four of the top 10 spots were located in Japan, five were in the US and one in Europe.
Today, IBM holds six of the top 10 fastest supercomputers on the Top500 list. In 2002, the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, IBM’s partner in the ASC project, exercised an option under the ASC Purple contract to build the then-prototype Blue Gene/L system. Now, Blue Gene systems account for five of the top ten systems on the list, and the BlueGene/L system is expected to remain the world’s fastest supercomputer for several more years.
The Blue Gene/L system, to be capable of more than 360 TFPs is 1/20th the size of other supercomputers, and will be used to by the national laboratories to develop and run a broad suite of scientific applications including the simulation of very complex physical phenomena of US national interest, such as turbulence, prediction of material properties, and the behavior of high explosives. Blue Gene/L will also be delivered in 2005.
Of course, with advances come new challenges. The advance in computation power has created new challenges in the storage, extraction and retrieval of data.
After ten years and three different supercomputer systems, IBM delivers ASC Purple to the US government, a supercomputer capable of 100 Teraflops. The IBM and government partnership has had a profound effect on the computing industry and society. And that’s just the beginning.
This week, the first of 25 trucks loaded with the IBM ASC Purple supercomputer will leave Poughkeepsie, NY and head towards their final destination – Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – where the supercomputer will ultimately begin its important task of safeguarding the United States nuclear stockpile.
The delivery concludes a 10-year multi-step program initiated by the US Department of Energy to build, with industry, a supercomputer capable of 100 Teraflops – the estimated level of computational capability needed to conduct nuclear simulations on a computer instead of with real-world testing. One Teraflop represents 1 trillion calculations per second.
At the time it was conceived, ASCI represented an increase of two orders of magnitude in processing capability. "It was considered a moon-shoot, an undertaking of what was believed to be insurmountable challenges," said Jay Pecce, overall ASCI program manager in the IBM Public Sector. "Nothing this ambitious had ever been done before."
"The ASC Purple project not only made its deliveries on schedule, it often exceeded its performance commitments," said Sohel Saiyed, program director, ASC development. "This was team IBM at its best."
Project helped usher in new computer technologies, fields of study
Photo of ASCPurple being loaded on a truck in POK
Part of ASC Purple is loaded on a truck in Poughkeepsie, NY
This project, in which hundreds of IBMers have been involved, has had a tremendous effect upon the computer industry and in many ways our society as a whole. It has helped usher in new technologies that both spurred new markets or forever changed old ones.
One of the key advances was the development of processor interconnect technology. Because processor speed increases alone could not meet the computing challenge, engineers developed this technology to allow thousands of processors to work on the same problem at once. Related software was developed to allow those thousands of processors to write data to a single file.
These innovations have allowed fundamental changes in science and business. The automotive industry now uses sophisticated simulations to build and design safer cars – virtually. Oil companies use modeling of the earth's geologic layers to pinpoint more likely sources of oil to reduce unneeded drilling. Weather forecasting has been improved – believe it or not. Boeing has even designed an entire virtual aircraft on a computer and brought it to market without ever building a prototype.
Opened new avenues of drug discovery, cancer research
A photo of ASC Purple being assembled
Another of ASC Purple's many parts being assembled at Poughkeepsie, NY.
Great strides have been made in genomic research, drug discovery and cancer research and new markets have opened up under these areas. Don Grice, distinguished engineer who has worked on the project for ten years, recalls how Cornell Medical Center redesigned the shape of their hip implant by borrowing an IBM supercomputer during an industry tradeshow.
IBM’s own eServer p575, now in heavy use by academia and industry, wasn’t even on the drawing board until the final phase of the ASCI contract.
ASCI, now known as ASC, with its series of computing milestones, injected a competitive spirit in the supercomputing industry. Companies including IBM, Intel, Cray, SGI, and others fought to win incremental government bids that offered both important research dollars as well as bragging rights to the "world’s fastest supercomputer." The publicity, enthusiasm and technical know-how spilled over into and influenced research fields in academia and private companies far beyond the project itself.
Competition changed the computer industry players, too
Over the course of the 10 year project, the competitive landscape has changed significantly. A variety of market forces from dramatic price/performance of processors and disk storage to innovative research has reshaped the field.
In 1996, the biggest players in the Top500 supercomputer listed Cray, SGI, IBM and Fujitsu. Hitachi held the top spot on the list with an installation at the University of Japan. In fact, four of the top 10 spots were located in Japan, five were in the US and one in Europe.
Today, IBM holds six of the top 10 fastest supercomputers on the Top500 list. In 2002, the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, IBM’s partner in the ASC project, exercised an option under the ASC Purple contract to build the then-prototype Blue Gene/L system. Now, Blue Gene systems account for five of the top ten systems on the list, and the BlueGene/L system is expected to remain the world’s fastest supercomputer for several more years.
The Blue Gene/L system, to be capable of more than 360 TFPs is 1/20th the size of other supercomputers, and will be used to by the national laboratories to develop and run a broad suite of scientific applications including the simulation of very complex physical phenomena of US national interest, such as turbulence, prediction of material properties, and the behavior of high explosives. Blue Gene/L will also be delivered in 2005.
Of course, with advances come new challenges. The advance in computation power has created new challenges in the storage, extraction and retrieval of data.
Early numbers show that IBM exceeded promised performance by 10%, largely due to compiler optimizations.
I've been working on this almost exclusively for the past four months in preparation for delivery, and it's an excellent way to go...my last day is tomorrow. Supercomputers ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuule.
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