By Matthew Dublin
It looks like bioinformaticists at UC San Diego are going to have considerably more computing power at their fingertips. Yesterday the San Diego Supercomputer Center there announced the official launch of the Triton Resource, a large-scale integrated supercomputing system that will be available to all on campus and beyond. According to a statement made by Arthur B. Ellis, vice chancellor for research for UC San Diego, Triton's "unique configuration is specifically intended to promote collaborative research across the entire campus and the UC system, serving as a catalyst for new ideas, innovation and interdisciplinary research." A source affiliated with the project also told me that Triton's managers are indeed expecting all manner of life sciences projects to make use of the big machine, although they have not listed users on the website as of yet.
What puts the "tri" in Triton is its three-part architecture, which is composed of the Triton Compute Cluster (TCC), the Petascale Data Analysis Facility (PDAF), and Data Oasis. Its designers say that the system's unusual architecture was built specifically to move massive amounts of data around the system itself and back out onto the campus network -- campus laboratories are connected to Triton via multi-10 Gigabit networks and UC researchers in other sites by a 10 Gigabit Ethernet campus connection to the statewide education network.
The TCC is being touted as a cheaper, energy-efficient alternative to 'closet computers' with its green server blades and Nehalem chips for an aggregate of 6TB of RAM across 256 nodes with a total peak performance of 24TF. The PDAF is built to handle massive data sets with 20 256GB and eight 512GB 32-core nodes -- they are claiming that a single node can be loaded to capacity in roughly 60 seconds. Not too shabby. The PDAF is also using the Lustre parallel file system with 9TB memory across 28 nodes with a peak speed of 9 teraflops. Finally, Data Oasis is scheduled to be built in two phases beginning in the fall. As its name implies, this part of Triton will be used to house large-scale disk storage with a high-bandwidth network connected to researchers in UC San Diego and the statewide UC system. Data Oasis will have 4PB -– the largest of any academic data center -- and will move between 60 and 120 gigabytes per second of data capacity with 3,000 to 6,000 individual disks. Anybody thinking about relocating to San Diego?
And in other big iron news, Cray has been cleaning up. The Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has awarded the supercomputer maker a five-year, $50 million contract to deliver its Cray XT5 supercomputer and then later upgrade it to some super monster computer capable of more than one petaflop performance. The folks at NERSC are keeping their fingers crossed for the initial system to be up and running by 2010, although tweaking will continue for a few years after that. And like its older brother Cray XT4 Franklin, the new system will be used to accelerate biology and chemistry research, among tons of other areas.
And solidifying its top spot as the world's most powerful supercomputer, Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer is getting a tune-up courtesy of Cray. Or more accurately, courtesy of another DOE-awarded contract that has Cray upgrading Jaguar with six-core AMD Opteron processor -- code named "Istanbul" -- which will increase the number of cores to more than 224,000. This will allow the system to reach a peak performance of two petaflops, up from the already mind-blowing 1.64 petaflops it reached at the end of last year.
