IBM Mira

Last updated
IBM Mira
Mira - Blue Gene Q at Argonne National Laboratory - Skin.jpg
Operators USDOE/SC/Argonne National Laboratory
Location Argonne National Laboratory
Architecture IBM BG/Q
5D Torus Interconnect configuration
786,432 cores
Power 3.9 MW
Operating system CNK [1]
Space 1,632 sq feet
Memory 768  TiB
Speed 8.59 petaFLOPS (LINPACK)
10.06 petaFLOPS theoretical peak
Ranking TOP500 : 11, 2017-11
Purpose Cosmology, Astronomy, lattice quantum chromodynamics, Nuclear reactor engineering, Material science, Weather, Climatology, Seismology, Biology, Computational chemistry, Computer science
Legacy Ranked 3 on TOP500 when built.
Web site www.alcf.anl.gov/user-guides/mira-cetus-vesta

Mira is a petascale Blue Gene/Q supercomputer. As of November 2017, it is listed on TOP500 as the 11th fastest supercomputer in the world, [2] while it debuted June 2012 in 3rd place. It has a performance of 8.59 petaflops (LINPACK) and consumes 3.9 MW. [3] The supercomputer was constructed by IBM for Argonne National Laboratory's Argonne Leadership Computing Facility with the support of the United States Department of Energy, and partially funded by the National Science Foundation. [4] Mira will be used for scientific research, including studies in the fields of material science, climatology, seismology, and computational chemistry. [5] The supercomputer is being utilized initially for sixteen projects, selected by the Department of Energy. [6]

Supercomputer extremely powerful computer for its era

A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, there are supercomputers which can perform up to nearly a hundred quadrillion FLOPS. Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in China, the United States, the European Union, Taiwan and Japan to build even faster, more powerful and more technologically superior exascale supercomputers.

TOP500

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.

LINPACK is a software library for performing numerical linear algebra on digital computers. It was written in Fortran by Jack Dongarra, Jim Bunch, Cleve Moler, and Gilbert Stewart, and was intended for use on supercomputers in the 1970s and early 1980s. It has been largely superseded by LAPACK, which runs more efficiently on modern architectures.

Contents

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, which commissioned the supercomputer, was established by the America COMPETES Act, signed by President Bush in 2007, and President Obama in 2011. [5] The United States' emphasis on supercomputing has been seen as a response to China's progress in the field. China's Tianhe-1A, located at the Tianjin National Supercomputer Center, was ranked the most powerful supercomputer in the world from October 2010 to June 2011. [4] Mira is, along with IBM Sequoia and Blue Waters, one of three American petascale supercomputers deployed in 2012. [4] The cost for building Mira has not been released by IBM. Early reports estimated that construction would cost US$50 million, [7] and Argonne National Laboratory announced that Mira was bought using money from a grant of US$180 million. [4] In a press release, IBM marketed the supercomputer's speed, claiming that "if every man, woman and child in the United States performed one calculation each second, it would take them almost a year to do as many calculations as Mira will do in one second". [8]

The America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act of 2007 or America COMPETES Act was authored by Bart Gordon and signed by President George W. Bush; it became law on 9 August 2007. This was an Act, "To invest in innovation through research and development, and to improve the competitiveness of the United States."

George W. Bush 43rd president of the United States

George Walker Bush is an American politician and businessman who served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. He had previously served as the 46th governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000.

Barack Obama 44th president of the United States

Barack Hussein Obama II is an American attorney and politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American to be elected to the presidency. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008.

One of the applications

"Argonne scientists used Mira to identify and improve a new mechanism for eliminating friction, which fed into the development of a hybrid material that exhibited superlubricity at the macroscale for the first time [..] simulating up to 1.2 million atoms for dry environments and up to 10 million atoms for humid environments [..] The researchers used the LAMMPS (Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator) code to carry out the computationally demanding reactive molecular dynamics simulations. [.. A] team of computational scientists [..] were able to overcome a performance bottleneck with the code's ReaxFF module, an add-on package that was needed to model the chemical reactions occurring in the system. [.. The team] optimized LAMMPS and its implementation of ReaxFF by adding OpenMP threading, replacing MPI point-to-point communication with MPI collectives in key algorithms, and leveraging MPI I/O. Altogether, these enhancements allowed the code to perform twice as fast as before." [9]

Superlubricity

Superlubricity is a regime of motion in which friction vanishes or very nearly vanishes. What is a "vanishing" friction level is not clear, which makes the term of the superlubricity to be quite vague. As an ad hoc definition, a kinetic coefficient of friction less than 0.01 can be adopted. This definition also requires further discussion and clarification.

Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator (LAMMPS) is a molecular dynamics program from Sandia National Laboratories. LAMMPS makes use of Message Passing Interface (MPI) for parallel communication and is free and open-source software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

ReaxFF is a bond order-based force field developed by Adri van Duin, William A. Goddard, III, and co- workers at the California Institute of Technology. One of its applications is molecular dynamics simulations. Whereas traditional force fields are unable to model chemical reactions because of the requirement of breaking and forming bonds, ReaxFF eschews explicit bonds in favor of bond orders, which allows for continuous bond formation/breaking. ReaxFF aims to be as general as possible and has been parameterized and tested for hydrocarbon reactions, alkoxysilane gelation, transition-metal-catalyzed nanotube formation, and high-energy materials.

"The research team is in the process of seeking a patent for the hybrid material, which could potentially be used for applications in dry environments, such as computer hard drives, wind turbine gears, and mechanical rotating seals for microelectromechanical and nanoelectromechanical systems." [9]

See also

Related Research Articles

In computing, floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second.

IBM Blue Gene series of supercomputers by IBM

Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS (petaFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.

TeraGrid

TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011.

Open MPI software

Open MPI is a Message Passing Interface (MPI) library project combining technologies and resources from several other projects. It is used by many TOP500 supercomputers including Roadrunner, which was the world's fastest supercomputer from June 2008 to November 2009, and K computer, the fastest supercomputer from June 2011 to June 2012.

Roadrunner (supercomputer) supercomputer built by IBM

Roadrunner was a supercomputer built by IBM for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. The US$100-million Roadrunner was designed for a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops. It achieved 1.026 petaflops on May 25, 2008, to become the world's first TOP500 LINPACK sustained 1.0 petaflops system.

Trilinos is a collection of open-source software libraries, called packages, intended to be used as building blocks for the development of scientific applications. The word "Trilinos" is Greek and conveys the idea of "a string of pearls", suggesting a number of software packages linked together by a common infrastructure. Trilinos was developed at Sandia National Laboratories from a core group of existing algorithms and utilizes the functionality of software interfaces such as the BLAS, LAPACK, and MPI.

Blue Waters

Blue Waters is a petascale supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On August 8, 2007, the National Science Board approved a resolution which authorized the National Science Foundation to fund "the acquisition and deployment of the world's most powerful leadership-class supercomputer." The NSF awarded $208 million for the Blue Waters project.

Kittyhawk is an IBM supercomputer. The proposed project entails constructing a global-scale shared supercomputer capable of hosting the entire Internet on one platform as an application, whereas the current Internet is a collection of interconnected computer networks.

JUGENE

JUGENE was a supercomputer built by IBM for Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany. It was based on the Blue Gene/P and succeeded the JUBL based on an earlier design. It was at the introduction the second fastest computer in the world, and the month before its decommissioning in July 2012 it was still at the 25th position in the TOP500 list. The computer was owned by the "Jülich Supercomputing Centre" (JSC) and the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing.

Marc Snir is an Israeli American computer scientist. He holds a Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professorship in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has a courtesy appointment in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He currently pursues research in parallel computing. He is principal investigator (PI) for the software of the petascale Blue Waters system and co-director of the Intel and Microsoft funded Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC).

Sequoia (supercomputer)

IBM Sequoia is a petascale Blue Gene/Q supercomputer constructed by IBM for the National Nuclear Security Administration as part of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC). It was delivered to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 2011 and was fully deployed in June 2012.

Petascale computing

In computing, petascale refers to a computer system capable of reaching performance in excess of one petaflops, i.e. one quadrillion floating point operations per second. The standard benchmark tool is LINPACK and Top500.org is the organization which tracks the fastest supercomputers. Some uniquely specialized petascale computers do not rank on the Top500 list since they cannot run LINPACK. This makes comparisons to ordinary supercomputers hard.

Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of at least one exaFLOPS, or a billion billion (i.e. a quintillion) calculations per second. Such capacity represents a thousandfold increase over the first petascale computer that came into operation in 2008. (One exaflop is a thousand petaflops or a quintillion, 1018, floating point operations per second.) At a supercomputing conference in 2009, Computerworld projected exascale implementation by 2018. This proved accurate, as Oak Ridge National Laboratory performed a 1.8×1018 flop calculation on the Summit OLCF-4 Supercomputer while analyzing genomic information in 2018. They were Gordon Bell Finalists at Supercomputing 2018.

MADNESS is a high-level software environment for the solution of integral and differential equations in many dimensions using adaptive and fast harmonic analysis methods with guaranteed precision based on multiresolution analysis and separated representations .

K computer supercomputer in Kobe

The K computer – named for the Japanese word "kei" (京), meaning 10 quadrillion (1016) – is a supercomputer manufactured by Fujitsu, currently installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. The K computer is based on a distributed memory architecture with over 80,000 compute nodes. It is used for a variety of applications, including climate research, disaster prevention and medical research. The K computer's operating system is based on the Linux kernel, with additional drivers designed to make use of the computer's hardware.

Supercomputing in Europe

Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.

Yellowstone (supercomputer) IBM supercomputer

Yellowstone was the inaugural supercomputer at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It was installed, tested, and readied for production in the summer of 2012. The Yellowstone supercomputing cluster was decommissioned on December 31, 2017, being replaced by its successor Cheyenne.

NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center

The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) is a high-performance computing (HPC) and data archival facility located in Cheyenne, Wyoming that provides advanced computing services to researchers in the Earth system sciences.

Summit (supercomputer) supercomputer developed by IBM

Summit or OLCF-4 is a supercomputer developed by IBM for use at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which as of November 2018 is the fastest supercomputer in the world, capable of 200 petaflops. Its current LINPACK benchmark is clocked at 143.5 petaflops. As of November 2018, the supercomputer is also the 3rd most energy efficient in the world with a measured power efficiency of 14.668 GFlops/watt. Summit is the first supercomputer to reach exaop speed, achieving 1.88 exaops during a genomic analysis and is expected to reach 3.3 exaops using mixed precision calculations.

References

  1. ↑ "IBM System Blue Gene Solution Blue Gene/Q Application Development". IBM . Retrieved 24 March 2014.
  2. ↑ "November 2017". TOP500 Project. Retrieved 15 November 2017.
  3. ↑ "Mira - BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60GHz, Custom". TOP500. Retrieved 23 August 2012.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Jackson, Joab (8 February 2012). "United States Commissions Beefy IBM Supercomputer". PC World . Retrieved 23 August 2012.
  5. 1 2 Wait, Patience (31 July 2012). "National Lab Replaces Supercomputer With Newer, Faster Model". InformationWeek . Retrieved 23 August 2012.
  6. ↑ NP, Ullekh (1 May 2011). "MIRA: World's fastest supercomputer". Economic Times . Retrieved 23 August 2012.
  7. ↑ Alexander, Steve (14 February 2011). "IBM's Mira will have super speed". The Journal Gazette. Retrieved 23 August 2012.
  8. ↑ Murph, Darren (9 February 2012). "IBM's Mira supercomputer does ten petaflops with ease, inches us closer to exascale-class computing". Engadget . Retrieved 23 August 2012.
  9. 1 2 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150721194001.htm
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.