Supercomputers of the future

Citation

Montgomery, H.A. (2001), "Supercomputers of the future", Kybernetes, Vol. 30 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2001.06730aaf.002

Supercomputers of the future

Supercomputers of the future

Keywords: IBM, Supercomputers, Cybernetics

Abstract Reports on the assembly and capabilities of IBM's new supercomputer, ASCI White, which will be used to simulate nuclear test blasts.

Last summer a large convoy of trucks left an IBM manufacturing plant in upstate New York and headed across the country to a federal weapons laboratory in Northern California.

The 28 semi-trucks were loaded with the first batch of components for the world's largest supercomputer, a monster machine the size of two basketball courts that draws enough electricity to power a small town.

Over the following months IBM's ASCI White was assembled at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the USA's leading nuclear research laboratories.

The first convoy delivered only a quarter of the machine. Several more will be needed to deliver the rest. IBM developers say that:

When it is up and running, ASCI White will be the most powerful computer on the planet. It will be used to simulate nuclear test blasts at an unprecedented level of detail and speed. One of the simulations will run for 30 days. A Cray supercomputer built in 1995 would take 60,000 years to perform the same calculations.

ASCI White can perform a mind-boggling 12.3 trillion operations a second, or 12.3 teraflops. It is three times faster than the previous fastest machine, another IBM giant known as ASCI Blue, which runs at 3.8 teraflops.

ASCI White is so powerful, it makes Deep Blue, its famous chess-playing cousin, look like a cheap pocket calculator. ASCI White is 1,000 times more powerful than Deep Blue, which generated 200 million chess moves every second to famously defeat World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov in May 1997.

ASCI White is not one computer, but a massively parallel machine made from 512 of IBM's RS 6000 servers. Each server has 16 processors – supercharged versions of the PowerPC chips used in Apple's Macs – which also operate in parallel (total processors: 8, 192).

Each server is about the size of an air conditioner. They are stacked on top of each other in refrigerator-sized racks, which, arranged row after row, fill a giant hall the size of two basketball courts.

Running a parallel version of IBM's AIX, Big Blue's flavor of UNIX, the ASCI White supercomputer takes two hours to boot up.

It requires the constant attention of a small army of systems administrators. Because of the sheer number of parts, it tends to break down, although IBM said the machine will run 100 hours without crashing.

"It's designed for ultra-high reliability", Jim Jardine, ASCI White program manager, said, "but it's not perfect".

ASCI White cost Lawrence Livermore $110 million but would have cost even more if IBM had not used off-the-shelf parts, according to a lab spokesman.

The machine joins a handful of giant supercomputers in the US Department of Energy's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, a multi-million-dollar effort to build supercomputers capable of simulating nuclear test blasts.

Under the terms of the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the USA is prohibited from test exploding weapons from its aging nuclear stockpile. Supercomputers allow scientists to predict how volatile materials in the warheads behave as they age and change.

ASCI White is hooked to a bank of imaging workstations that convert data from a simulation into a visualization of the detonation, which is projected onto a giant screen.

Weapons scientists will be able to see the actual atoms, said IBM's Jardine.

"I've been told the physicists come away with a feeling of awe", Jardine said. "They say: 'that's what it looks like'. They finally get to see the physics."

Dr David Nowak, the ASCI program leader at Lawrence Livermore, said ASCI White will allow scientists to design extremely complex simulations and see the results in less time than ever before. The length of the tests vary, running from minutes to months. The supercomputer will also be used for non-weapons research. Twice a year, it will be turned over to university researchers for three or four days for work on astrophysics, materials science and drug discovery.

Dick Sherman, president of RCI, a consortium of supercomputer vendors and users, said it is likely ASCI White will lead to scientific breakthroughs that weren't possible with the previous generation of machines. "It may help tackle problems that haven't been tackled before", he said. "Universities are hungry for high computing access and this would help them".

Despite its astounding speed and complexity, the current ASCI White cannot really deliver the most minute details of a nuclear blast that scientists want. For that, the ASCI program estimates it needs a 100 teraflop machine.

IBM said it plans to deliver an even bigger, faster version of ASCI White by 2004.

If IBM manages it, massively parallel supercomputers will be evolving at a rate that far outstrips Moore's Law, which dictates that computing power doubles every 18 months.

Both IBM and Lawrence Livermore believe this rate of change will mean today's hundred-million-dollar supercomputers are the widely affordable workstation of choice within a decade.

H.A. Montgomerye-mail: fhd@tca.net