Introduction of Supercomputer Columbia

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Introduction of Supercomputer Columbia

• By
• Desira Stover, Zhizhou Wang

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- Built by NASA, Intel, SGI, and Voltaire
finished on Oct. 26, 2004 - Named to honor the
crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia lost Feb. 2003
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Columbia System Facts (1)

• Based on SGI NUMAflex architecture 20 SGI
  Altix 3700 superclusters, each with 512
  processorsGlobal shared memory across 512
  processors
• 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 processors Current
  processor speed 1.5 gigahertzCurrent cache 6
  megabytes
• 1 terabyte of memory per 512 processors, with 20
  terabytes total memory

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Columbia System Facts (2)

• Operating Environment Linux based operating
  systemPBS Pro job schedulerIntel
  Fortran/C/C compilerSGI ProPack 3.2 software
• Interconnect SGI NUMAlinkInfiniBand
  network10 gigabit Ethernet1 gigabit Ethernet
• Storage Online 440 terabytes of Fibre Channel
  RAID storageArchive storage capacity 10
  petabytes

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SGI Altix 3700 Hardware

• An adaptation of SGI's Origin 3000 systems, which
  use SGI's NUMAflex global shared-memory
  architecture - The NUMAflex design
  enables the CPU, memory, I/O, interconnect,
  graphics, and storage to be packaged into modular
  components, or "bricks".
• Each 3700 in NASA Consists of 128 CPU-Bricks,
  112 Router-Bricks, 4 I/0-bricks.
• Each C-Brick on the Altix contains 2 nodes with
  4 processors, 2 SHUB, 7.6 GB of memory, one
  network interface and one I/O interface.

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SGI Altix 3700 Software

• Operating System SGI Linux Environment 7.2 with
  SGI ProPack (RedHat 7.2 with Linux 2.4.21)
• Compilers Intel IPF (Itanium Processor Family)
  Compilers C/C, Fortran for Linux GNU
  compilers C , Fortran 77
• Filesystem Softwares XFS 64-bit journaled
  filesystem CXFS shared filesystem
• Other Softwares Debugers, Libraries ,
  Performance Analysis , Linux System Utilities

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Intel Itanium Processor 2 (1)

• The Itanium chip is based on the IA-64 (Intel
  Architecture, 64 bit) architecture that
  implements the EPIC (Explicit Parallel
  Instruction set Computing) technology.
• The Itanium processors use long instruction
  words. Specifically, three instructions are
  grouped into a 128-bit bundle. Each instruction
  is 41 bits wide.
• Four memory-load operations per cycle can be
  delivered from the L2 cache to the floating-point
  register file.
• Branch predication the processor can predict the
  outcome and proceed on the basis of that
  prediction point(branch), and current processors
  try to guess which branch to take.
• Speculative loads look ahead at its instruction
  and load the required data from the memory early.

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Intel Itanium Processor 2 (2)

• Specifications
• 32KB L1 instruction cache and L1 data cache
• 256KB L2 unified (instruction and data) cache
• 6MB L3 unified (instruction and data) cache
• CPU Clock 1.5GHZ
• Operating Systems Windows Server 2003(64-bit),
  HP-UX 11i, Red Hat Linux, SuSE Linux,
  MSC.Linux, United Linux, Open VMS.

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Voltaire ISR9288 InfiniBand Cluster Switch

• Key Features
• Up to 288 InfiniBand 4X (10Gbps) ports in a 14U
  enclosure Alternative 96 InfiniBand 12X (30
  Gbps) ports
• 5.76 Tbps of full bisectional switch bandwidth in
  a Fat-Tree (CLOS) architecture
• Less than 420 nanosecond of latency between any
  two ports
• Optional multiprotocol connectivity with up to
  132 GbE ports and up to 132 2 Gb FC ports
• Hot-swappable components, redundant management
  blades, power supplies and fans meet stringent
  availability requirements
• InfiniBandTM specification 1.1 compliant

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Benchmarks and Rank

• sustained performance of 51.87 trillion
  calculations per second (teraflops)
• peak performance of 60.96 teraflops
• Ranks 2nd in Top 500

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NASAs Columbia Supercomputer

• Used in
• Shuttle ascent simulation and modeling
• Fuel liner analysis conducted for the NASA
  Engineering Safety Center and Return to Flight
  program
• Surface speed of the ocean on a unique
  cubesphere grid for accurate depiction of th
  poles
• Space and life science, mission safety,
  aeronautics, and Earth sciences

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References

• http//www.nas.nasa.gov
• http//www.sgi.com
• http//www.intel.com
• http//www.voltaire.com
• http//www.top500.org