From itumeztr@sariyer.cc.itu.edu.tr Tue Mar 4 11:19:17 1997 Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 00:58:57 +0200 (EET) From: ITU Mezunlari Dernegi Haber Dagitim Merkezi To: ** ITUMD ** ISTANBUL TEKNIK UNIVERSITESI MEZUNLARI DERNEGI ULUSLARARASI KURULUSU Subject: NEWSFLASH - ONE TERAFLOPS BROKEN BY SANDIA/INTEL SYSTEM (fwd) _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ _/ To: ITU Alumni Scattered All Around The World _/ _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ ONE TERAFLOPS BROKEN BY SANDIA/INTEL SYSTEM 12.17.96 ============================================================================= Santa Clara, Calif. -- The United States Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratory and Intel Corporation have built a parallel supercomputer that has reached the one trillion-operations-per-second performance mark using the MP Linpack, the two organizations announced. The achievement of 1.06 teraflops (trillions of floating point operations-per-second) shatters the previous performance record of 368.2 gigaflops (billion-operations-per-second) by over 250 percent, according to an Intel new release. The configuration consisted of 57 cabinets, 7,264 Pentium Pro processors, and 454 gigabytes of system memory. "Today's accomplishment is computing's equivalent to breaking the sound barrier," said Craig R. Barrett, Intel executive vice president and chief operating officer. "Just a few years ago, a teraflop was an intellectual barrier that nature dared us to cross. Now that we've surpassed that barrier, we have the computing horsepower needed to address the Grand Challenges of Science. We could be at the threshold of robust scientific discovery, triggered by access to teraflop-level computing performance." The Intel/Sandia Teraflops Computer is currently under construction at Intel's Beaverton plant. The system will be installed in stages at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico in the first half of 1997. At completion, the computer will have 9,200 Pentium Pro processors and is expected to perform at sustained rates of 1.4 teraflops and peak rates of approaching two teraflops. "The Intel/Sandia teraflop computer is built from commercial, off-the-shelf products and technologies including the same Pentium Pro processor in many of today's workstations and servers," said Ed Masi, general manager and vice president of Intel's Server Systems Products Division. "Using commercially available technology has enabled the government to utilize the R&D muscle of the marketplace, focusing tax dollars on combining these standard building blocks into the world's most powerful computer." --------------------------------------------------------------------------- INTEL SHATTERS TERAFLOPS BARRIER ============================================================================= Washington, D.C. -- Mount Teraflops is flying the banner of Intel's Pentium Pro processor. The company that 25 years ago invented the microprocessor this month scaled the pinnacle of high performance computing. Using just three fourths of the mammoth scalable computer they're building for the U.S. Department of Energy's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), Intel demonstrated sustained performance of 1.069 teraflops on the MP Linpack benchmark and became the first company to plant its flag in teraflops territory. They also nearly tripled the Linpack record. The previous marker of 368.2 gigaflops was set earlier this year by a Hitachi system at the Center for Computational Physics at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. The teraflops milestone was announced this morning by Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, who called it "an astonishing and extraordinary achievement." "The nation has received an early holiday gift, and it was delivered online, on time, and on budget," said a jubilant O'Leary. "This milestone, once thought to be unachievable in this century, will help us deliver on our commitment to provide a safe, effective nuclear deterrent without the need for underground tests." Vice President Al Gore issued a statement saying that the teraflops breakthrough "confirms the United States as the world's preeminent computer power, and maintains our national standard of global scientific and technological leadership." "When I authored the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, this kind of computing power was a noble but distant dream," Gore commented. "We knew it would take more than bigger machines and better software. It would take an entirely new kind of computing technology. With the strong support of the Clinton Administration and the ingenuity of American industry, we have been able to bring about this achievement. I am proud of this Administration's role in making this new technology possible." Intel representatives were equally enthusiastic. "This is truly an exciting accomplishment, not only for the unprecedented level of performance but for how it was achieved," said Craig Barrett, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Intel. "It's remarkable that you can use standard building blocks to scale from a single processor in your desktop computer clear up to the world's most powerful system." Intel's historic run, the first to sustain a teraflops on a general-purpose computer, began at 11:20 a.m., ended at 1:01 p.m. on Dec. 4, and was greeted with cheers by the crowd of employees gathered outside the computer integration room at Intel's Beaverton, Oregon, teraflops facility. The run performed more than 6.4 quadrillion calculations and sustained average performance of 1.069 teraflops. It solved a matrix of size 215,000 by 215,000 that was created using the random problem generator from ScaLAPACK, a portable parallel linear equation solver. Further tests showed the N(1/2) number (the problem size that achieves half the peak performance) to be 53,400. The results have been validated by Jack Dongarra, a developer of the Linpack benchmark and keeper of the official list of confirmed results. The Intel computer, part of ASCI's Option Red program, is being shipped in stages to Sandia National Laboratories, where it will be used by scientists from Sandia, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for advanced computer simulations in support of the nuclear weapons test ban treaty. Roughly 180 gigaflops worth of the system are already installed at Sandia: a three-cabinet, 60-gigaflops system was installed in November, and a six-cabinet, 120-gigaflops increment shipped just the day before the teraflops demonstration. A two-cabinet development system has been on-site since April. Codes from the three labs are already running on the new systems at Sandia and on various configurations at the Intel facility. Applications work under way has included a billion-atom molecular dynamics simulation, a world's-fastest Sweep3D run, and production runs of the CTH and ALEGRA (EMMA) codes. The full machine will have 76 compute cabinets, 10 I/O cabinets, 4,630 nodes, 9,260 Pentium Pro processors, 573 gigabytes of system memory and 2.25 terabytes of disk storage, and is expected to offer sustained Linpack performance of 1.4 teraflops. The configuration that broke the teraflops barrier consisted of 57 cabinets, 3,632 compute nodes, 7,264 200 MHz Pentium Pro processors, and 454 gigabytes of system memory. Oh, yes. It got the right answer, too. ------------ Additional information about the Intel ASCI teraflops computer is available at http://www.ssd.intel.com and http://www.cs.sandia.gov ************************************************************************** H P C w i r e S P O N S O R S