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LLNL/RPI Supercomputer Smashes Simulation Speed Record

Posted by timothy on from the in-a-world-of-make-believe dept.

Lank writes "A team of computer scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have managed to coordinate nearly 2 million cores to achieve a blistering 504 billion events per second, over 40 times faster than the previous record. This result was achieved on Sequoia, a 120-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q normally used to run classified nuclear simulations. Note: I am a co-author of the coming paper to appear in PADS 2013."

7 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. rPi is different from RPI by stewsters · · Score: 5, Funny

    Was i the only one who thought for a second that this was about a raspberry pi cluster?

  2. can you put the paper online? by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Note: I am a co-author of the coming paper to appear in PADS 2013.

    I clicked hoping to read the paper, but the actual paper doesn't seem to be posted, only the abstract. The ACM copyright policy explicitly allows authors to "Post the Accepted Version of the Work on ... the Author's home page", so there is no legal barrier to the authors putting a PDF online. Doing so would of course increase readership of the paper, so ought to benefit everyone.

    --
    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    1. Re:can you put the paper online? by Lank · · Score: 5, Informative

      I didn't realize that it was acceptable to post it before the conference even happened. But you're right so here it is.

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      Gotta get me one of these!
  3. Re:Simulation of what? by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 4, Funny

    No, those events are Who. Simulating is How. What is calculated.

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    Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
  4. This could be good... by aussie.virologist · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'd be interested in seeing if this system could run our full Poliovirus simulations (consisting of around 3.5 million atoms). I've run our simulations on the BlueGene/Q at VLSCI using 32,768 cores (65,536 threads) and have been getting a very respectable 11.2 nanoseconds per day of simulation data using NAMD. Some data on our full virus simulations can be found here... (VIDRL supercomputer simulation page). Hey Lank, maybe you can help me figure out a way to crack the millisecond mark for our full-virus sims??? Great work and cheers from down under :-)

  5. It was an LLNL supercomputer, not an RPI supercomp by DJefferson · · Score: 4, Informative

    The title to this piece is wrong. The supercomputer in question was Sequoia, the Blue Gene/Q supercomputer located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Some preliminary work was done on a smaller RPI BG/Q machine, however. (I am a coauthor of the paper.)

  6. Re:what OS please? by DJefferson · · Score: 4, Informative

    It runs a custom IBM OS specifically designed for Blue Gene/Q. It proveds an API very similar to Linux, but with some restrictions, e.g. static limits on threads, no process forking, and custom MPI messaging instead of a TCP/IP stack.