Atipa to Supply HPC to Energy’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory

A new supercomputer expected to rank among
the world’s fastest machines will be ready to run computationally intense
climate and biological simulations along with other scientific programs this
summer.

This computational work will aid research in climate and environmental science,
chemical processes, biology-based fuels that can replace fossil fuels, new
materials for energy applications and more.

Chosen by a competitive process, Atipa Technologies, a division of Microtech Computers, Inc. in Lawrence,
KS, will provide the machine to EMSL, the Department of Energy’s Environmental
Molecular Sciences Laboratory. It is a national user facility on DOE’s
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory‘s (PNNL) campus that provides experimental and HPC capabilities to enable users to address environmental
and energy challenges through molecular-level theory and experiment. It is also
home to the new supercomputer’s predecessor, Chinook. As a national user
facility resource, the new system will be available to scientists everywhere who
will be able to apply on a competitive basis to use it. Currently, about 400
scientists use Chinook.

"We’re
developing a supercomputer that will aid energy, environment and basic science
missions important to DOE," said PNNL computational scientist Bill
Shelton, the associate director at EMSL who manages HPC.
"Enhanced computing power will
benefit our users who conduct experiments and want to verify them with
modeling. Integrating computational theory with experiment is critical to
accelerating scientific discovery."

Funded by DOE’s Office of Science, the new $17 million machine will likely peak
at 3.4 quadrillion – 3.4 million billion – calculations per second and be more
than 20 times faster than the four-year-old Chinook. The new supercomputer’s
capacity and speed are expected to rank it among the world’s top 20 fastest
machines when it comes online. Peaking at 3.4 petaflops, the computer will
be able to do in one hour what would take a typical laptop more than 20 years
to do.

Atipa Technologies has been providing HPC to DOE and its labs for more than a decade.

"We’re
excited to have the opportunity to provide the new supercomputer with a
theoretical peak performance of 3.38 petaflops and 2.7 PB of usable storage. It
will be built and deployed by Atipa Technologies in collaboration with
Supermicro (Super Micro Computer, Inc)," said Mike Zheng, president of Atipa Technologies.

As EMSL’s HPC researchers from around the world will be able to use it. The EMSL
team designed it for researchers who typically need resources of this scale but
don’t generally have access to such a powerful computer. This availability
makes it stand out from other supercomputers.

"Its
uniqueness is that it will be optimally configured for climate and chemistry
simulations and biological analyses," said Shelton.

For example, the new machine will offer
added speed for improved climate models.

"The new computer provides a
wonderful opportunity for climate scientists to get more work done and get each
simulation done more quickly," said PNNL climate scientist Phil Rasch.
"It is a huge jump in the computing
power available to us and it will
produce more details about how organisms work."

"I’m excited because with the amount of
data researchers are generating in biology, this supercomputer will open up new
avenues for our users," said EMSL biology science lead Scott Baker.
"More computing power is like having
more pixels in a picture. We’ll be able to look at proteins and complex
biological interactions more realistically. This will allow us to better
understand and control organisms like microbes so that we can develop new
renewable fuels."

The design’s 196,000 processing units are Intel processors combined with Intel
Phi many integrated core (MIC) accelerator cards. The accelerator cards will
ratchet up the power. They work with the conventional processors and memory and
allow up to 120 extra calculations per node to be performed simultaneously
rather than one at a time. (Anyone with a graphics card in their personal
computer has taken advantage of a hardware accelerator.) The system’s 23,000
Intel processors have 184,000GB of memory available, about four times as much
memory per processor as other supercomputers. The additional memory will allow
scientists to use the processors more efficiently for biology, climate
research, chemistry and materials science.

Atipa will deliver the computer’s
components by July 2013 and assemble it at EMSL. The EMSL team will spend a few
months installing and configuring the system and getting it up to speed. They
expect to have it running for national and international researchers in October
2013. In the meantime, EMSL will be sponsoring a naming contest among EMSL
users and friends.

The New Supercomputer’s Fast Facts:

• Theoretical peak processing speed of 3.4 petaflops
• 42 racks
• 195,840 cores
• 1,440 compute nodes with conventional processors and Intel Xeon Phi MIC accelerators
• 128GB memory per node
• FDR IB network
• 2.7PB shared parallel file system (60GB/s read/write)