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Exploring big scientific mysteries requires big computing power.
Ed Seidel, researcher at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, studies black holes and neutron stars in an attempt to understand the basic properties of space and time.
Seidel and the research team he works with use Linux and an open source program called Cactus they developed to aid them in their work. And they are eagerly anticipating running those programs on one of the first supercomputers with Intel's Itanium processor.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana announced on Tuesday that NCSA will install two IBM Linux clusters at NCSA, creating the world's fastest Linux supercomputer in academia, and the fourth fastest supercomputer overall in the world.
NCSA's new clusters will have 2 teraflops of computing power and will be used by researchers to study some of the most fundamental questions of science, such as the nature of gravitational waves first predicted by Albert Einstein in his Theory of Relativity.
The fastest computer in the world is IBM's ASCI White, with a computational capability of 12.3 teraflops (capable of 12 trillion calculations per second). The ASCI White covers an area the size of two basketball courts and is used by the U.S. Department of Energy program to help ensure the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile without real-world testing. NCSA's new supercomputer takes 4th place on the ASCI list of the world's fastest computers, replacing the IBM ASCI Blue-Pacific, which runs at 1.2 Teraflops.
"We believe that Linux clusters will soon be the most widely used architecture for parallel computing, and that these two clusters from IBM are the best way to deliver terascale performance," said Dan Reed, director of NCSA and the National Computational Science Alliance.
In June, Seidel, astrophysicist Wai-Mo Suen of Washington University in St. Louis, and their international research teams were given access to NCSA's 256-processor Origin2000.
By the time Suen and Seidel had finished their simulations, they had output nearly a terabyte of data and logged an astonishing 140,000 CPU-hours on the Origin2000. That's equivalent to more than 16 years on a single-processor machine.
Suen credited the success of the June runs to "more than a dozen of us on both sides of the Atlantic cutting our daily allowance of sleep to less than five hours for two weeks."
The runs were monitored nonstop in both Germany and the United States. Whoever first noticed a problem took the initiative to kill, correct and restart the job.
"The explosion of the open source community, the maturity of clustering software, and the enthusiasm of the scientific community all tell us that Linux clusters are the future of high-performance computing," Seidel said.
"It was very exciting (but) we are limited by how much time we can get on such large machines. I hope very much that NCSA will be able to continue to make such extraordinary high-end resources available in order to make this kind of science more routine," Seidel added.
Harnessing the firepower of 600 IBM eServer xSeries servers, the new NCSA machine will process 2 trillion calculations per second. It would take one person with a calculator more than 1.5 million years to tabulate the number of calculations that the new NCSA machine will handle in a single second.
That kind of raw power and speed is necessary to tackle the kind of jobs that Seidel and his team have in store for the new supercomputer – such as simulations of the violent collision of black holes and the resulting gravitational waves.
"Because of Linux clusters – which are cost-effective, scalable and integrate open source software with vendor solutions – commodity-based supercomputing is now a reality. This allows us to explore nature's most exotic phenomena, such as black holes, with much more detail and at much lower cost than ever before," Seidel said.
Seidel's team will also be using Cactus, an open source problem solving application that originated in the academic research community. Cactus has been widely used by a large international association of physicists and computational scientists.
The name Cactus is a visual reference to the application's basic structures – a central core that connects to application modules (the "thorns") through an extendable interface. The thorns can implement custom scientific or engineering applications, or standard computational chores.
Cactus also allows applications that are developed on standard workstations or laptops, to be seamlessly run on clusters or supercomputers.
"The latest release of Cactus provides a middleware layer for enabling many applications to scale from their desktop to the teraflop," said Seidel.
The first of the new NCSA clusters, to be installed in February by IBM Global Services, will be based on IBM eServer x330 thin servers, each with two 1 GHz Intel Pentium III processors, running Red Hat Linux. The second cluster, to be installed this summer, will be one of the first to use Intel's next generation 64-bit Itanium processor and will run TurboLinux.
Research scientists traditionally have had to build their own computing systems and write their own code for each research project.
Being tinkerers by trade, they want to have their hands deep into the research from beginning to end. Ready-to-go but tinker-friendly Linux and open source applications allows researchers to keep their hands inside their projects while cutting down development and rollout time, explained Dave Turek, vice-president of Deep Computing at IBM.
"These IBM Linux clusters will enable scientists to focus more on the results of their research initiatives, freeing them from the additional burden of building their own clusters and writing code to support their heavy computational demands," said Turek.