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By Gary Stiehr, June 28, 2009 2:37 pm

DOE's Roadrunner Supercomputer

DARPA has issued an RFI (pdf) to help enable what they are calling Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC).  According to the June 2009 TOP500 supercomputer list, the fastest supercomputer available, Roadrunner, runs at just over 1 PFLOP.  It uses around 2.5 million watts of electricity and requires around 278 racks of equipment [1].

DARPA would like to fit the same computational power into one air-cooled rack and use no more than 57,000 watts (including cooling).  That’s 100% of Roadrunner’s computational power in 0.4% of the space using 2% of the electrical power. Also, while the most energy efficient system now achieves 536 Mflops/watt [2], DARPA is looking for 50 Gflops/watt.

What’s more, is that they would like to minimize the overhead associated with thousand-way to billion-way parallelism.  Why billion-way parallelism?  I suppose this implies an anticipation of systems containing billions of execution units.  This  may not be unreasonable.  For example, take a look at the proposed Sequoia supercomputer, which is proposed to include one million cores.

Beyond these astounding requirements, there are also requests for a “Self Aware OS” that is introspective, goal-oriented, adaptive, self-healing and approximate.  I’d recommend reading page eight of the RFI above for more details.  The hope is that the system will be able to continue operations in the face of failures and “attack” (see page 4 of RFI).

Well, while the OS and application capabilities will be huge challenges, the restrictions put on the physical aspects of the hardware are also challenging.  With GPUs and Cell processors leading to increased computations per watt, perhaps we may be able to significantly improve overall system power efficiencies.  In addition, DARPA is looking for this to take place potentially in 9 years (proposals are due by July 27, 2009) if it is feasible.  With top supercomputers sometimes becoming more powerful than the 500 most powerful supercomputers combined from four years prior, we can definitely see overall computational ability increase quickly but this doesn’t necessarily translate into the density and energy efficiencies.

Aside from the RFI above, you can read more here or here.  Also, thanks to @HPC_Guru from whom I first heard about this RFI.

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By Gary Stiehr, June 25, 2009 12:11 am

After reading a perspective of the latest TOP500 Supercomputer List from @Chris P_Intel I took another look at the progress of the systems on the list shown above.  The June 2009 list just released puts the RoadRunner supercomputer in the number one spot with 1105 TFLOPS.  In June 2004, just five years ago, all 500 supercomputers combined summed to 813 TFLOPS, with the most powerful single system being the Earth-Simulator at 36 TFLOPS.  So in just five years, a single supercomputer has become more powerful than the 500 most powerful supercomputers from June 2004.

Upon taking a closer look, I saw that RoadRunner was actually in the number one spot in June 2008 at 1026 TFLOPS.  So the top supercomputer on the list in June 2008  was actually faster than all of the top 500 supercomputers combined from four years prior!

Ok, and going back to November 2005, it seems that the #1 system may have been more powerful than the sum of the top 500 supercomputers in November 2002.  So perhaps we are down to three years…I haven’t verified exact numbers though.  Has anyone officially tracked the record for how quickly the #1 supercomputer on the TOP500 list had achieved the performance of all of the supercomputers on a previous TOP500 list?