Mira Ushers in a New Era of Scientific Supercomputing
Mira, the new petascale IBM Blue Gene/Q system being installed at the ALCF, will usher in a new era of scientific supercomputing. An engineering marvel, the 10-petaflops machine is capable of carrying out 10 quadrillion calculations per second.
The ALCF is committed to delivering 786 million core hours on Mira in 2013. In full production mode starting in 2014, over 5 billion computing hours will be allotted to scientists each year.
Mira—On the Forefront of Green Supercomputing
As computers become faster and more powerful, they also need to become more energy efficient to be practical and sustainable. Through a combination of innovative new chip designs and extremely efficient water cooling, Mira will be five times more energy efficient than Intrepid, its Blue Gene/P predecessor at the ALCF. Blue Gene/Q systems currently hold the top five spots on the Green500 list that ranks the top 500 supercomputers in the world by energy efficiency.
Gearing Up for Mira—The ALCF’s Early Science Program
The Early Science Program (ESP) aims to prepare key applications for the architecture and scale of Mira, and to solidify libraries and infrastructure that will pave the way for other future production applications. ALCF staff is working with 16 research teams from across the nation to port and tune their codes on Blue Gene/Q prototype hardware.
Early Science Projects
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Ab-initio Reaction Calculations for Carbon-12 Steven C Pieper ESP 2010 to 2013 110 Million Hours |
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Accurate Numerical Simulations Of Chemical Phenomena Involved in Energy Production and Storage with MADNESS and MPQC Robert Harrison ESP 2010 to 2013 150 Million Hours |
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Climate-Weather Modeling Studies Using a Prototype Global Cloud-System Resolving Model Venkatramani Balaji ESP 2010 to 2013 150 Million Hours |
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Cosmic Structure Probes of the Dark Universe Salman Habib ESP 2010 to 2013 150 Million Hours |
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Direct Numerical Simulation of Autoignition in a Jet in a Cross-Flow Christos Frouzakis ESP 2010 to 2013 150 Million Hours |
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Global Simulation of Plasma Microturbulence at the Petascale & Beyond William Tang ESP 2010 to 2013 50 Million Hours |
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Introducing Mira: Our Next-Generation Supercomputer
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