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Distinguished Lecture Series on Petascale Simulation: Roadrunner: Science, Cell, and a Petaflop

Date: 11/5/2008

Time: 3:30-5:00 p.m. U.S. Central Daylight Time (UTC - 5 hours)

Location: ACES 2.302 (Avaya Auditorium), UT Austin main campus

Sponsors:
The Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin.

Speaker:
Dr. Andy White, Deputy Associate Laboratory Director for Theory, Simulation and Computation
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Location:
ACES 2.302 (Avaya Auditorium), UT Austin main campus

Reception:
3:00 to 3:30 pm, ACES Connector Lobby

Live Webcast:
http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/petascale
Note: Viewing the webcast requires installing a browser plug-in which can be found on the website above.

Abstract:
Roadrunner is a hybrid2 LINUX cluster of modest extent. It first achieved LINPACK sustained petaflop/s performance on May 26, 2008. Each compute node consists of two dual-core AMD Opterons connected to four IBM PowerXCell 8i chips. The full system has 17 interconnected sub-clusters, each with 180 compute nodes and 12 I/O nodes. Peak node performance is approximately 450 gigaflop/s.

We will describe the PowerXCell 8i and system architecture in some detail. A number of application codes have already been implemented on Roadrunner: plasma physics, molecular dynamics and radiation transport. Early PowerXCell performance results range from 4x - 9x the performance on an Opteron core. There is a second set of applications in preparation including materials science, cosmology, turbulence and biotechnology. We will describe some of the applications design and programming opportunities on this system. Many core chips with hybrid functionality and system power requirements are two key issues for the future of high performance computing.

Roadrunner provides a first-of-a-kind look at some of the possibilities. The PowerXCell chip has two types of cores. It requires a new programming style to manage nine total cores and eight on-chip local stores. Three PowerXCell based systems are at the top of the Green 500 list, each over 400 MF/s per watt. The Roadrunner project is a partnership among IBM, LANL and NNSA.

Speaker Biography:
Andy White is the Deputy Associate Laboratory Director for Theory, Simulation and Computation at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is also the Project Director for the Roadrunner Project and the Los Alamos Institutional Computing Project Director. From 1989 to 1998, he was founder and Director of the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos, as well as the Program Manager for DOE's HPCC (High Performance Computing and Communications) program. He has been an Associate Director of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC); a member of the ad hoc Task Force on the Future of the NSF Supercomputing Centers (Hayes Committee); Principal Investigator for the DOE High Performance Computing Research Center at Los Alamos and at various times assistant, deputy and acting Division Leader of the Laboratory's computing divisions.

His research interests are applied mathematics, high performance computing, simulation and modeling, predictive computational capabilities and data corruption in simulations. He holds a B.A. in the Liberal Arts Honors Program from UT Austin and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Caltech.

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