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NSF Announces Supercomputer Grant Winners
An anonymous reader writes "The NSF has tentatively announced that the Track 1 leadership class supercomputer will be awarded to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Track 2 award winner is University of Tennessee-Knoxville and its partners."
From the article:
"In the first award, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) will receive $208 million over 4.5 years to acquire and make available a petascale computer it calls "Blue Waters," which is 500 times more powerful than today's typical supercomputers. The system is expected to go online in 2011. The second award will fund the deployment and operation of an extremely powerful supercomputer at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville Joint Institute for Computational Science (JICS). The $65 million, 5-year project will include partners at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research."
TG Daily is also covering this with more details, and has a picture tour of the current NCSA supercomputer facility.
I'm glad we have the NSF out there supporting the development of faster and faster supercomputers. Pretty soon these machines will be able to locate the correct Sarah Connor in the phone book on the first try.
The Schwartz space ain't from Spaceballs.
I think that the NSF funds it, the universities get to run the research, and IBM gets to build the machine.
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http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08
-WtC
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Creator of RPerl, Scouter, Juggler, Mormon, Perl Monger, Serial Entrepreneur, Aspiring Astrophysicist, Community Organiz
"Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real "wow, that's big," time. Infinity is just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here."
My PhD advisor does computational quantum chromodynamics on supercomputers. Quantum chromodynamics is the current theory of the nuclear force. Unfortunately, nobody can actually calculate all that much with it because the math is too hard, but we think it's the right theory because of some symmetry arguments. One of the big challenges at the moment in high-energy theory is to actually see what QCD predicts. Basically the perturbation + renormalization approach that worked so well for quantum electrodynamics doesn't work on QCD because of the "asymptotic freedom" property of quarks: the potential between two quarks grows without bound as you separate them, until it's big enough that you wind up color-polarizing the vacuum and creating a wad of quarks and gluons if you try to separate two quarks.
Since perturbation theory doesn't work, the only way to get answers out of the thing is to solve the equations numerically on a lattice using Monte Carlo methods. To do this requires, as you probably guessed, Big Fucking Computers.
though it would be at least 6 years too late.
You make a good point. It is now possible to buy a quad core from Dell for about $750 (or less) to play around with. However, as mentioned earlier in this discussion, the work of Klaus Schulten at Illinois is quite instructive. His program NAMD (not another molecular dynamics program) has been designed from the ground up to scale well on many processors. This program does a lot better in this respect than most other md programs out there, although this will no doubt change. So don't despair about this being a second rank research tool. There are some folks poised to take good advantage of it. I do strongly agree with your point that fundamental advances can still be made on small systems.
Ahh what the heck - A terminator walks into a bar... barman: Why the mimetic polyalloy face? terminator: I'm a T-1000 terminator from the future sent to kill Sarah Conner.
I worked as a system engineer on the supercomputers at NCSA from 97 till 2000. Once they are up and stable they are pretty much pushed to the limits. The users are constantly pushing for more procs, more memory, more storage. They'll use every flop they can get.
In fact, a lattice QCD problem was one of the model problems for the Track 1 proposals. Proposers had to "provide a detailed analysis of the anticipated performance of the proposed system on the following set of model problems...A lattice-gauge QCD calculation in which 50 gauge configurations are generated on an 84^3*144 lattice with a lattice spacing of 0.06 fermi, the strange quark mass m_s set to its physical value, and the light quark mass m_l = 0.05*m_s. The target wall-clock time for this calculation is 30 hours." Full details here.
This is a Big F-ing Problem that does in fact require Big F-ing Computers to solve. To meet the target time would require at least a petaflop of sustained performance; hence the inclusion of this problem in the call for proposals. The other model problems came from CFD and molecular dynamics, and there was a wide range of smaller required problems as well.
Now, none of this explains how these machines will really be used, or to what end. Nevertheless, I can vouch for such large machines being used under heavy load to solve very large problems. Poke around any of the national supercomputing labs' websites, and you should be able to find at least plenty of news releases, if not papers.
Here are some quick samples:
Throwing a bunch of rocks at a single bulldozer is a serial act.
The parallel problem is to get a fleet of 100 bulldozers or 1000 bulldozers or 10,000 bulldozers simultaneously attacking a pile of rocks so that:
A) The bulldozers aren't constantly colliding with one another, and
B) When the bulldozers back off to avoid colliding with one another, they aren't all just sitting around twiddling their thumbs, needlessly burning diesel fuel [not to mention "prevailing" union wages & time value of the loan which was used to purchase the bulldozers], while waiting in endlessly long lines until it's time for their turn [finally!] to take a whack at the pile of rocks, and so that
C) The inefficiencies of B) aren't so great that it's actually counterproductive to have introduced the extra bulldozers in the first place.