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New IBM Cluster to Go into Production in January
NERSC users who run jobs on 256 to 512 processors will benefit from the “Bassi,” the new IBM cluster which goes into production on Monday, Jan. 9, 2006. During the acceptance testing, users reported that codes ran up to 10 times faster on Bassi than on Seaborg.The new machine is an IBM p575 POWER 5 system with 888 processors available for parallel scientific computation. Each Bassi processor has a theoretical peak performance of 7.6 Gflop/s. The processors are distributed among 111 compute… Read More »
NERSC, IBM Collaborate on New Software Strategy To Simplify Supercomputing
This month’s IBM announced an innovative software strategy in supercomputing which allows customers to leverage the General Parallel File System (GPFS) across mixed-vendor supercomputing systems for the first time. This strategy is the result of a direct partnership with NERSC. GPFS is an advanced file system for high performance computing clusters that provides high speed file access to applications executing on multiple nodes of a Linux or AIX cluster. GPFS’s scalability and performance… Read More »
NERSC Launches Linux Networx Supercomputer into Production
Linux Networx and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science announced today that DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has accepted a 722-processor Linux Networx Evolocity® cluster system for full production use by researchers across the nation. Read More »
New Data Analysis, Mathematics and Visual Analytics Server Enters Production
In mid-August, NERSC put into production a new server specifically tailored to interactive visualization and data analysis work. The 32-processor SGI Altix, called DaVinci, offers interactive access to large amounts of large memory and high performance I/O capabilities typically required to analyze the large datasets produced by the NERSC high performance computing systems (jacquard and seaborg). “With its 192 gigabytes of RAM and 25 terabytes of disk, DaVinci’s balance is biased toward… Read More »
NERSC Is First Production Site on ESnet’s Bay Area MAN
On August 23, the NERSC Center became the first of six DOE research sites to go into full production on ESnet’s new San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Area Network (MAN). Once completed, the new MAN will provide dual connectivity at 20 to 30 gigabits per seconds (10 to 50 times the current site bandwidths, depending on the site using the ring) while significantly reducing the overall cost. The connection to NERSC consists of two 10-gigabit Ethernet links. One link will be used for production… Read More »
NERSC’s Bill Kramer Is Honored by NASA, Cited by HPCwire
NERSC Center General Manager Bill Kramer received two very different honors recently: a NASA Group Achievement Award for the Advanced Air Transportation Technologies (AATT) Project Team, and inclusion in the HPCwire newsletter’s annual list of “People to Watch” in HPC. Bill, who came to Berkeley Lab from NASA Ames in 1996, was one of the original seven members of the AATT Project team from September 1994 to February 1996. He became the first AATT Program Office Director in 1995. Bill’s… Read More »
NERSC Reaches Another Checkpoint/Restart Milestone
On the weekend of June 11 and 12, IBM personnel used NERSC’s Seaborg supercomputer for dedicated testing of IBM’s latest HPC Software Stack, a set of tools for high performance computing. To maximize system utilization for NERSC users, instead of “draining” the system (letting running jobs continue to completion) before starting this dedicated testing, NERSC staff checkpointed all running jobs at the start of the testing period. “Checkpointing” means stopping a program in progress… Read More »
NERSC’s Nick Cardo Helps IBM Refine System Software Testing
Nick Cardo, NERSC’s IBM SP project lead, was invited earlier this year to give a customer perspective to staff at IBM’s test lab in Poughkeepsie, NY. Cardo spent two days at the facility, demonstrating how he runs various systems tests regularly on Seaborg, NERSC’s IBM supercomputer. For two days, Cardo worked side by side with IBM staff on their test SP, showing them how he runs tests on a daily basis. The result was that the IBM staff were able to see what a user encounters. “By… Read More »
Berkeley Lab to Host Sixth Workshop on the DOE Advanced CompuTational Software (ACTS) Collection for HPC Applications
A four-day workshop introducing the DOE Advanced CompuTational Software (ACTS) Collection will provide hands-on instruction in building robust scientific and engineering high-end computing applications. The workshop will be held Aug. 23-26 at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. Read More »
ORNL’s David Dean Elected to Lead NERSC Users Group
NERSC Division Director Horst Simon announced this month that David Dean, a nuclear physics scientist from Oak Ridge National Lab, has been elected chair of the NERSC Users Group. Stephane Ethier, a fusion energy scientist from the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, has been elected vice chair. “Both are long term users of NERSC with an excellent understanding of the issues facing NERSC users,” Simon wrote in his announcement. “I am looking forward to work with them for the benefit of all… Read More »
NERSC’s Storage Strategy Paying Off in Savings
Since relocating to Berkeley Lab almost 10 years ago, one of NERSC’s goals has been to consistently introduce new technologies without creating bottlenecks. In a program of planned upgrades to tapes with greater density, the Mass Storage Group has not only achieved this goal, but will save $3.7 million over the course of five years. Over that same time, from 2003 to 2007, the amount of data stored will grow from just over 1 terabyte to 11.3 terabytes. As computational science becomes… Read More »
NERSC Staff Help Pave the Way for Running Larger Jobs on Seaborg
As home to one of the largest supercomputers open for unclassified research, the NERSC Center has moved aggressively to devote a greater share of its processing time to jobs running on 512 or more processors.Since the start of Fiscal Year 2005 on Oct. 1, 2004, more than two-thirds of the processing time available on Seaborg has been utilized by jobs running on 512 or more processors (32 nodes). Seaborg comprises 6,080 computing processors. Through January, 76 percent of Seaborg’s processing… Read More »
