Lab Gets Data Analytics It Needs

By DE Editors

The IBM Blue Gene/P Intrepid at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF; Argonne, IL), located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, will soon have the data analytics and visualization capability it needs. Argonne awarded GraphStream, Inc. (Belmont, CA), a contract that will help to make data analytics and visualization at this scale possible through the “world’s largest” installation of NVIDIA (Santa Clara, CA) Quadro Plex S4 external graphics processing units (GPU), states the release.

The new supercomputer installation, nicknamed Eureka, will allow researchers to explore and visualize the data they produce with Intrepid. The installation will offer 104 dual quad core servers with 208 Quadro FX5600 GPUs in the S4s.

Most applications that run on large-scale systems like Intrepid generate huge volumes of data that represent the results of the calculations. An essential tool for understanding those results after the run has completed is to be able to explore rapidly the output data and convert it to a visual representation. To do so at the scale required by Intrepid applications requires a system with Eureka’s power.

GraphStream will use the NVIDIA Quadro Plex (S4) visual computing system as the base graphics building block.

The ALCF’s Blue Gene/P Intrepid provides resources for the DOE’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, which supports computationally intensive projects from industry, scientific researchers, and research organizations.

The base server building block is the SuperMicro 6015-UR. The S4 attaches to a server on either side of it, forming a “sandwich.” To the servers, it appears as if they have two Quadro FX5600 graphics cards inside of them. While there are small system disks in the server, all of the data comes from the large storage system over the network.

Economical, low-latency modular switches represent the heart of the data-management system. The nine-switch complex supports up to 2,048 connections, each of which simultaneously exchanges data at roughly 1 billion bytes per second. The storage system offers a bank of more than 10,000 disk drives that will send and receive data from the Blue Gene/P’s more than 100,000 processors. Altogether, this system can deliver nearly 80 billion bytes per second to and from the disk-the equivalent of transferring the content of 100 full CDs every second, helping it earn its “distinction as the fastest computer in the world for open science and the third fastest overall computer in the world,” according to the release.

For more information, visit the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF).

For other details, go to NVIDIA or GraphStream, Inc.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.