Project Highlights
Providing a Gateway for Scientific Discovery
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The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) provides the computational science community with a world-leading computing capability dedicated to breakthrough science and engineering. The ALCF houses the IBM Blue Gene/P system named Intrepid, which debuted in June 2008 as the world’s fastest computer for open science and third fastest overall. Both rankings represented the first time an Argonne-based supercomputing system placed in the top five of the industry’s definitive list of supercomputers.
A gateway for scientific discovery, the ALCF is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national leadership-class computing facility sponsored by DOE’s Office of Science. DOE selects major ALCF projects through the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. This program seeks computationally intensive, large-scale research projects that can make high-impact scientific advances through the use of a large allocation of computer time, resources, and data storage.
In 2009, DOE awarded 28 research projects 400 million processor hours of computing time on the Blue Gene/P at the ALCF. The breakthrough science being conducted spans a diverse range of scientific areas—from researching combustion to increase energy efficiency and reduce emissions to improving climate models to studying the causes of Parkinson’s disease.
ALCF staff members provide in-depth expertise and assistance in using the BG/P and optimizing user applications. Both the Catalyst and Applications Performance Engineering and Data Analytics (APEDA) teams support the users’ projects.
The Catalyst team establishes strategic collaborations with the ALCF’s leading project partners to maximize benefits from the use of ALCF resources. The team provides full project lifecycle assistance, value-added services, and support in conjunction with ALCF hardware and software resources, tailored services for unique requirements of a given research initiative, and close contact with research teams through ongoing interactions with an assigned ALCF project coordinator.
The APEDA team helps ALCF users achieve the best performance in their applications. To this end, team members work closely with users in porting, tuning, and parallelizing their applications on the Blue Gene/P. They also address I/O and data analytics issues that inhibit performance. The team is comprised of staff with extensive experience in computer architectures; computational algorithms; porting, performance tuning, and parallelizing of scientific applications and other software; I/O; and graphics.
Blue Gene/P Resources
Intrepid is an IBM Blue Gene/P system with a peak speed of 557 Teraflops and a Linpack speed of 450 Teraflops. Intrepid’s configuration features 40,960 nodes, each with four processors or cores for a total of 163,840 cores and 80 terabytes of memory. The 40-rack system went into full production in February 2009.
For most applications, effective use of such a powerful system requires being able to get high volumes of data in and out quickly and to store large quantities online. Intrepid’s data systems consist of 640 I/O nodes that connect to 16 storage area networks (SANs) that control 7,680 disk drives with a total capacity of 7.6 petabytes of raw storage and a maximum aggregate transfer speed of 88 gigabytes per second. Two parallel file systems—PVFS and GPFS–manage the storage. An HPSS automated tape storage system provides archival storage.
The ALCF also operates Surveyor, a BG/P system with 1,024 quad-core nodes (4,096 processors) and 2 terabytes of memory. Surveyor is used for tool and application porting, software testing and optimization, and systems software development.
Contact
Pete Beckman
Argonne Leadership Computing Facility
