NASA Ames Installs First 512-Processor SGI Altix-Linux Supercomputer

NASA AMES INSTALLS WORLD'S FIRST 512-PROCESSOR ALTIX SUPERCOMPUTER

NASA's high-performance computing capabilities have taken a giant step
forward with the installation of the world's first 512-processor SGIR AltixT
single-system image (SSI) supercomputer at NASA Ames Research Center,
Moffett Field, Calif.

NASA Ames, a renowned leader in the development of large single-system image
machines, has been collaborating with SGI over the past seven years in the
development of the world's first 256-, 512- and 1,024- processor global
shared-memory systems. Recently, engineers at NASA and SGI worked together
to expand the capabilities of the SGI Altix line of scalable systems. The
latest result is NASA's new 512-processor SSI Altix system based on the
LinuxR operating system, the first of its kind in the world.

"With the addition of the new SGI Altix system, NASA's high-end computing
testbed activities in support of the agency's science and engineering
missions will be greatly enhanced," said Dr.Walt Brooks, chief of the NASA
Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at NASA Ames Research Center, located
in California's Silicon Valley. "Thanks to its outstanding performance
capabilities, this new testbed is already helping NASA achieve breakthrough
results to meet major challenges in atmospheric and ocean modeling and
aerospace vehicles," Brooks added.

The SGI Altix 512-processor system is part of an ongoing NASA effort to push
the limits of high-performance computing.  "Creating and using this system
took just a matter of weeks-from September to October," said Jim Taft, lead
for the advanced computing technologies effort at NASA Ames. "The current
system is already in partial production,  running mission-critical
computations in aeronautics and Earth sciences around the clock. With the
current workload, stability of the system has been excellent," Taft said.

According to Bob Ciotti, an Ames research scientist and the lead for the
center's Terascale Applications Group, the new supercomputer achieved a
Linpack Rmax rate of 2.45 teraflops and a STREAMS Triad rate of 1.007
terabytes per second-the fastest performance measurement in the world by
both ratings for a shared-memory system, and the first to break the one
terabyte limit on the memory bandwidth benchmark.

"Shared-memory systems have the communication characteristics necessary to
scale applications to hundreds of processors," Ciotti explained. "With this
new Altix, the worst-case communication latency is less than a
microsecond-and that's important for sustained performance when running on
all 512 processors."


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The new supercomputer is being used for a joint effort by NASA Headquarters,
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., NASA Ames Research
Center and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., to deliver
high-resolution ocean analysis in the framework of the ECCO (Estimating the
Circulation and Climate of the Ocean) Consortium, which involves the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge,
Mass., and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, La Jolla, Calif.

"The turnaround time users typically see on large ocean simulations can take
months," Ciotti said. "By dedicating half of the machine to the ECCO project
and scaling the code to run efficiently on all the processors, we now expect
turnaround to be about two to three days."  Scientists of the ECCO
Consortium believe that running in this very high-performance environment
will help them better understand ocean circulation and its impact on global
climate patterns.

The new SGI Altix SSI system is both faster and more efficient than its
predecessor, which was the world's first 1,024-processor SGI Origin-based
supercomputer, acquired by NASA Ames in November 2001.  The Altix system
also provides dramatically better price/performance, utilizing both the
IntelR Itanium 2R processors and a 64-bit Linux operating environment.

NASA Ames' quest for building increasingly larger SSI systems is driven by
the goal of providing the simplest and most efficient system for
high-performance computing to its scientific users. This simplicity in
design has translated into rapid advancement through each stage of the
project.

"As we progressed through each stage of development, from 64, to 128, to 512
processors, the system has performed almost flawlessly, with performance
numbers routinely three to four times the previous best results at NAS with
a similar number of processors," said Taft.

The new Altix system is driven by IntelR Itanium 2R processors and has a
total memory of about one terabyte.  Introduced in January 2003, the Altix
3000 systems incorporate the high-performance SGI NUMAflex global shared
memory architecture.  The NUMAflexT design enables the CPU, memory and its
operating systems, graphics and storage to be packaged into modular
components, or "bricks."

The new supercomputer is the first in a series of high end computing
testbeds driven by a recently forged partnership between NASA's Office of
Aerospace Technology and Office of Earth Science.

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