Linux Supercomputer Bulks Up

A 2000-processor Intel Itanium 2 supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Labs may have edged out Lawrence Livermore National Lab's Intel Xeon-based Multiprogrammatic Capability Cluster for the title of world's fastest Linux supercomputer.

The PNNL says that its supercomputer cluster takes the crown following completion of an upgrade this week. The lab has boosted the system's peak performance from 6.2 trillion floating point operations per second (T FLOPS) to 11.8T FLOPS.

The upgrade involved adding 1400 1-GHz Itanium 2 McKinley processors in the PNNL's William W. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory supercomputer in Richland, Washington. The new processors run at 1.5 GHz and are based on Intel's follow-up to its McKinley design, which is called Madison.

In Search of Speed

"It's about 11,800 times faster than the average personal computer," says Scott Studham, PNNL Molecular Science Computing Facility's manager of computer operations. "Most computers have between 250MB and 1GB of memory. This one has 7000GB of memory."

Linux has emerged in the past few years as an increasingly popular operating system for the highly technical supercomputer market.

In the last month, Dell announced plans to build a 17.7T FLOPS Xeon system for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Meanwhile, Cray, Fujitsu, and IBM are building Linux supercomputers in the 11T FLOPS to 40T FLOPS range.

Supercomputer's Job

The Energy Department lab's upgrade process took just over a month, with a team of ten Hewlett-Packard employees on site unpacking and installing about 250 Madison microprocessors into the Labs' McKinley-based Rx2600 machines each week, Studham says.

"On a weekly basis, a semi truck with processors would show up," says Studham, who claims to have developed more than a passing familiarity with the CPU upgrade process. "I can personally tell you that there are four screws required to take out an Itanium 2 CPU," he adds.

The 3000-square-foot, $24.5 million system will be used for various computationally intensive tasks at the labs. Researchers will use it for studying basic chemistry and biology, and for modeling how leaked radioactive material might move underground.

For this kind of science, the Itanium 2's floating-point performance of 6 billion operations per second made it a better fit than AMD's rival Opteron processor, Studham says.

"It was important for us to build out of the fastest processor we could get," he says. He estimated that the labs would have needed 1000 more processors to achieve the same level of floating-point performance with an Opteron-based supercomputer.