z*******n
发帖数: 1034 | 1 November 14, 2014 7:00 AM
Dean Takahashi
The Department of Energy has awarded $425 million in federal funding to IBM,
Nvidia, and other companies who will build two giant supercomputers many
times more powerful than today’s most powerful machines.
Ernest Moniz, U.S. Secretary of Energy, announced Friday that the government
will fund two high-performance computing supercomputers as part of a drive
toward exascale computing, or a machine capable of one exaflop, or 10 to the
18th power floating point operations per second. Moniz said that the
investments will help ensure the U.S. will have scientific, economic, and
national security for future generations. The unstated goal: We must have
more computing power for scientific research than other countries can
marshal, because data is power.
About $325 million of the money will go toward two state-of-the-art
supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge and Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratories. Those computers are expected to be five to
seven times more powerful than today’s fastest systems in the U.S. Those
systems are needed because, well, big data is getting bigger.
Moniz also announced $100 million to fund extreme scale supercomputing
technologies as part of a research and development program titled
FastForward2.
John Kelly of IBM at the SIA 2014 dinner.[/caption]
“High-performance computing is an essential component of the science and
technology portfolio required to maintain U.S. competitiveness and ensure
our economic and national security,” Moniz said in a statement. “DOE and
its National Labs have always been at the forefront of HPC, and we expect
that critical supercomputing investments like Coral and FastForward2 will
again lead to transformational advancements in basic science, national
defense, environmental and energy research that rely on simulations of
complex physical systems and analysis of massive amounts of data.”
IBM will supply its Power architecture processors, while Nvidia will supply
its Volta graphics processing units (GPUs), and Mellanox will provide
interconnected technologies to wire everything together. The systems will be
used for nuclear bomb simulation and deterrence, technology advancement,
and scientific discovery.
John Kelly, senior vice president at IBM and director of IBM research, told
VentureBeat that the new machines will put the U.S. at the top of the heap
in having the world’s most powerful supercomputers. And, because of the
unique architecture, which puts the processors near the data, the U.S. will
likely have a lead in access to Big Data. He said that IBM refers to data as
“the world’s next natural resource.”
Oak Ridge National Laboratories’ new system, Summit, is expected to be five
times more powerful than its current system, Titan. And Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory’s new Sierra supercomputer is expected to be at least
seven times more powerful than its current machine, Sequoia.
In another announcement, the DOE and the National Nuclear Security
Administration (NNSA) will create a project dubbed FastForward2 that will
develop technology needed for future energy-efficient machines. Partners
will include AMD, Cray, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia. The Summit system at Oak
Ridge National Laboratory will deliver 150 to 300 peak petaflops, and it
will be used for “open science.”
“Today’s science is tomorrow’s technology,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of
Nvidia, in a statement. “Scientists are tackling massive challenges from
quantum to global to galactic scales. Their work relies on increasingly more
powerful supercomputers. Through the invention of GPU acceleration, we have
paved the path to exascale supercomputing, giving scientists the tool for
unimaginable discoveries.”
The supercomputers will be far different from the ones of the past, which
relied upon thousands of microprocessors. Modern software can now take
advantage of the inherent parallel processing capability of GPUs, which do
the same tasks over and over, in parallel processing. So each supercomputer
node is likely to have both a microprocessor and a GPU.
“Our users have the most complex scientific problems and need exceptionally
powerful computers to meet national goals,” said Buddy Bland, project
director of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge
National Laboratory, in a statement. “The projected performance of Summit
would not have been possible without the combination of these technologies,
which will give our users an exceptionally powerful tool to accomplish these
goals.” |
|
