Subscribe free to our newsletters via your
. 24/7 Space News .




TECH SPACE
Keeneland Project Deploys New GPU Supercomputing System for the National Science Foundation
by Staff Writers
Atlanta GA (SPX) Nov 20, 2012


File image.

Georgia Tech, along with partner research organizations on the Keeneland Project, including the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, the National Institute for Computational Sciences and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have announced that the project has completed installation and acceptance of the Keeneland Full Scale System (KFS).

This supercomputing system, which is available to the National Science Foundation (NSF) scientific community, is designed to meet the compute-intensive needs of a wide range of applications through the use of NVIDIA GPU technology.

In achieving this milestone, KFS is the most powerful GPU supercomputer available for research through NSF's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) program.

"Keeneland provides an important capability for the NSF computational science community," says Jeffrey Vetter, Principal Investigator and Project Director, with a joint appointment to Georgia Tech's College of Computing and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

"Many users are running production science applications on GPUs with performance that would not be possible on other systems."

Scientists will be able to use the resource to create breakthroughs in many fields of science. For the past 20 months, the Keeneland Initial Delivery System (KIDS) has been used for research in both computer science and computational science, and has included applications in astronomical sciences, atmospheric sciences, behavioral and neural sciences, biological and critical systems, materials research and mechanical and structural systems, along with many other application areas. Much of the research will continue on KFS.

Keeneland's early users note how the system's capabilities have significantly advanced their research application areas.

"The Infiniband communication is now fast enough so that I can run my program on more GPUs to achieve better performance," says Jens Glaser, a post-doctoral associate in chemical engineering and materials science at the University of Minnesota.

Glaser believes his research results demonstrate that the KFS' hardware is a significant step forward in supercomputing.

Astrophysics researcher Jamie Lombardi, an associate professor in the Department of Physics at Allegheny College, says Keeneland is easily the fastest system he has used.

Lombardi uses his hydrodynamics code Starsmasher to simulate the collision and merger of two stars. The dynamics of the gas are parallelized on the CPU cores, while the gravity calculations are parallelized on the GPUs.

"Running on one node of KFS is nearly a factor of three faster than running on one node of my local cluster," says Lombardi. "The availability of such a large number of nodes on KFS makes it possible for me to run higher resolution simulations than I have ever run before."

The Keeneland Full Scale System is a 615 TFLOPS HP Proliant SL250-based supercomputer with 264 nodes, where each node contains two Intel Sandy Bridge processors, three NVIDIA M2090 GPU accelerators, 32 GB of host memory, and a Mellanox InfiniBand FDR interconnection network.

KFS has delivered sustained performance of over a quarter of a PetaFLOP (one quadrillion calculations per second) in initial testing. The system is space efficient in that it occupies about 400 square feet, including the space for in-row cooling and service areas.

During the KFS installation and acceptance testing, the initial delivery system, KIDS, was used to start production capacity for XSEDE users seeking to run their applications on the system and who had received allocations for Keeneland through a peer review process.

KIDS was upgraded with newer GPUs and used for software and application development and for pre-production testing of codes that utilize the GPU accelerators in the Keeneland systems.

Even before KFS began production, allocation requests for time greater than the total available for its lifecycle had been received from XSEDE application users.

"Our Keeneland Initial Delivery system has hosted over 130 projects and 200 users over the past two years," says Vetter. "Requests for access to Keeneland have far outstripped the planned resource delivery, sometimes by as much as twice the availability."

The Keeneland Project is a five-year Track 2D cooperative agreement, which was awarded by NSF under Contract OCI-0910735 in 2009 for the deployment of an innovative high performance computing system to the open science community. The Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, the National Institute for Computational Sciences, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory manage the facility, perform education and outreach activities for advanced architectures, develop and deploy software tools for this class of architecture to ensure productivity, and team with early adopters to map their applications to Keeneland architectures.

.


Related Links
College of Computing at Georgia Tech
Keeneland
XSEDE
Space Technology News - Applications and Research






Comment on this article via your Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail login.

Share this article via these popular social media networks
del.icio.usdel.icio.us DiggDigg RedditReddit GoogleGoogle








TECH SPACE
Titan is also a green powerhouse
Oak Ridge, TN (SPX) Nov 18, 2012
Not only is Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan the world's most powerful supercomputer, it is also one of the most energy-efficient. Titan came in at number three on the Green500 list. Organized by Virginia Tech's Wu-chun Feng and Kirk Cameron, the list takes the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers-as ranked by the Top500 list-and reorders them according to how many calculations they can ... read more


TECH SPACE
China's Chang'e-3 to land on moon next year

Moon crater yields impact clues

Study: Moon basin formed by giant impact

NASA's LADEE Spacecraft Gets Final Science Instrument Installed

TECH SPACE
Martian And Terran History Finding a common denominator

Meteorites reveal warm water existed on Mars

NASA Rover Providing New Weather and Radiation Data About Mars

CU LASP package ready for MAVEN integration bound for Mars

TECH SPACE
NASA Selects Information Technology Flight Operations Support Contract

SciTechTalk: All work and no play?

Get some bed rest - all 21 days of it

Latest China military hardware displayed at airshow

TECH SPACE
Mr Xi in Space

China plans manned space launch in 2013: state media

China to launch manned spacecraft

Tiangong 1 Parked And Waiting As Shenzhou 10 Mission Prep Continues

TECH SPACE
Three ISS crew return to Earth in Russian capsule

Station Crew Off Duty After Undocking

Space station command changes

Russia restores space contact after cable rupture

TECH SPACE
France, Germany seek Ariane compromise at ESA space meet

ILS Launches the EchoStar XVI Satellite

Arianespace's fourth Spaceport mission with Soyuz ready for fueling

Ariane 5's sixth launch of 2012

TECH SPACE
Rare image of Super-Jupiter sheds light on planet formation

Astronomers Directly Image Massive Star's 'Super-Jupiter'

NASA's Kepler Wraps Prime Mission, Begins Extension

Lowell astronomer, collaborators point the way for exoplanet search

TECH SPACE
Bug repellent for supercomputers proves effective

Keeneland Project Deploys New GPU Supercomputing System for the National Science Foundation

Lockheed Martin Expands Range Of Cloud Computing Services for UK Government

Invisibility cloaking to shield floating objects from waves




The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2014 - Space Media Network. AFP, UPI and IANS news wire stories are copyright Agence France-Presse, United Press International and Indo-Asia News Service. ESA Portal Reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement,agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by Space Media Network on any Web page published or hosted by Space Media Network. Privacy Statement