Mira

Coming in 2012

Watch for Mira, IBM’s next-generation Blue Gene/Q supercomputer, to be delivered to the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) in 2012.  Computational scientists and engineers look to the speed, memory size, and disk storage capacity of this leadership-class system to propel innovation in science and technology. The 10-petaflops supercomputer will feature 48K 16-way compute nodes (768K processors), and 768 terabytes of memory. Like the ALCF’s Intrepid, an IBM Blue Gene/P system, Mira will be made available to scientists from industry, academia, and government research facilities around the world.

Argonne anticipates that Mira will be one of the fastest and most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world after its construction and installation are complete, due to a combination of innovative new chip designs and extremely efficient water cooling. Argonne also envisions Mira as a stepping-stone to exascale-class computers. Exascale computing has the potential to address a class of highly complex work loads that formerly have been beyond scientists’ reach—not just due to their sheer size, but because of their inherent uncertainties and unpredictability—challenges like understanding the impacts of regional climate change and the design of safe nuclear reactors.

Mira will offer an opportunity for scientists to become familiar with characteristics of exascale systems and the programming changes they will require. For example, it will provide a platform for scaling current computer codes to more than 750,000 individual computing cores and exploring thread-oriented programming. This capability will give researchers preliminary experience on how scalability might be achieved on an exascale-class system with hundreds of millions of cores.

Once Mira is in production, computer time will be awarded through the Department of Energy’s INCITE and ALCC programs, as well as through Argonne’s Director’s Discretionary projects. Watch for the remarkable scientific advances made possible by Mira in the blink of an eye.

The ALCF's Mira system will consists of:

  • 48 racks
  • 1024 nodes per rack
  • 1.6 GHz 16-way core processor and 16 GB RAM per node
  • 384 I/O nodes
  • 240 GB/s, 35PB  Storage

For a total of 768K cores, 768 terabytes of RAM, and a peak performance of 10 petaflops.