Saturday November 10, 2007

Dr. Alfred Geiger, Head of Solutions & Innovations Scientific & Technical ICT, T-Systems Solutions for Research GmbH, gave the first customer presentation at the HPC Consortium here in Reno. His talk focused on the compute requirements needed by C²A²S²E, the Center for Computer Applications in Aerospace Science and Engineering.

C²A²S²E is one of four European centers focused on aspects of a European initiative in aeronautics that aims to sustain growth in the air transport market without increasing the environmental impact of the industry. As one would expect, numerical flow simulations will play a critical role in achieving this goal and these simulations will require very large computational resources. These simulations span a broad range, including ice prediction, low-speed wing design, flutter prediction, ground effect modelling, etc. All of these problems require significant CFD capabilities on the order of a million-fold increase over current simulation capabilities.

Computationally, the mainstay of the required CFD computation is a CFD code called Tau. Using a multi-grid approach with unstructured meshes, and typically 60 neighbors per domain, overall application performance will depend heavily on the ability to efficiently handle small message transfers at high message rates. InfiniBand has consequently been chosen as the interconnect for the C²A²S²E HPC system. And Sun's Constellation switch (Magnum) has been chosen as the switch fabric for the C²A²S²E system.

When looking at processors, T-Systems found that while IBM's BlueGene/L system delivered the best absolute performance, when they looked at performance per watt, the AMD Barcelona processor proved to be the best choice. Dr. Geiger estimates that from a 2-3 year total cost of ownership (TCO) perspective, power and cooling costs are on par with hardware acquisition costs. The Barcelona processor has therefore been chosen as the processor for this project.

The system will consist of 758 nodes with 16GB memory and 10 nodes with 32 GB for a total of 6144 cores all connected with Sun's InfiniBand switching technology. The system will run SLES9 and will make a variety of compiler suites (including Sun Studio) available for C²A²S²E users.

It's that time of year again. Time to mount up and head to the year's biggest High Performance Computing event, Supercomputing. Reno is the gathering place this year.

As usual, Sun is holding a customer event this weekend, just prior to the conference. The Sun HPC Consortium brings together Sun HPC customers and Sun technical field engineers, product engineers, and marketing people for a weekend of presentations and discussions about all things HPC. As I have done for the last several Consortium meetings, I intend to blog as many of our customers' presentations as I can.

I like the Consortium meetings because it gives me a chance to really sit down and talk with some of our customers about their issues and requirements so I can take that information back into Engineering for future product planning.

Customers have told me they like the event because it gives them a chance to meet other Sun HPC customers, sharing best practices and experiences, and to get the straight scoop on what Sun is doing in a variety of HPC-related areas.

It's an excellent event, though intense and exhausting. By the time the Consortium ends, I'm usually ready for a break. But of then course, it is time for the Supercomputing conference itself to begin and the pace just accelerates.

This year I'll stay at Supercomputing long enough to attend the OpenMP Board of Directors meeting (I'm the current Chairman of the Board) and then fly to Colorado to do an "HPC and Storage" presentation with one of Sun's storage experts, Sean Cochrane, to a group of Sun's technical field groups, the Data Management Ambassadors. I'll spend the balance of Thursday meeting with people on Sun's Broomfield campus, and then fly home on Friday.