 |
Inside this Issue |
||
| Pinging Pingo | |||
One of the heaviest snowstorms of the decade didn’t put a damper on the dedication ceremony for the newest member of the Arctic Region Supercomputer Center’s family of high performance computing machines, a 3,456-processor Cray XT5 named Pingo, capable of crunching 30 trillion arithmetic calculations a second. A record 9 inches of snow fell in Fairbanks March 5, the day ARSC hosted a virtual ribbon-cutting ceremony to dedicate Pingo. Cray Inc. President and CEO Peter Ungaro, ARSC Director Frank Williams, University of Alaska Fairbanks Chancellor Brian Rogers and UAF Vice Chancellor for Research Virgil “Buck” Sharpton spoke at the ceremony to a crowd of about 70 people in the auditorium of the University of Alaska Museum of the North. An unknown number of people viewed the webcast of the ceremony, which is archived at www.arsc.edu/news/20090305pingo_video.html. A live video feed from the machine room in the Butrovich Building on the UAF campus, where ARSC’s supercomputers and massive storage facilities are housed, connected the audience with ribbon-cutters Greg Newby, ARSC chief scientist, and Kurt Carlson, ARSC HPC systems programmer. To officially dedicate Pingo, ARSC Director Williams asked the audience to join in a countdown from ten as the signal for Newby and Carlson to cut the ribbon wrapped around the new supercomputer. “The addition of Pingo doubles the center’s capacity to solve computationally intensive problems of great interest to the state and the nation,” said Williams. Pingo will allow ARSC to expand studies of atmospheric phenomena such as those that rely on modeling how weather influences volcanic ash transport. Such studies can be used to alert aircraft flying northern polar routes and protect the health and safety of people on the ground. Pingo will also help researchers develop advanced tools for Arctic-specific, high-resolution forecasting to include models of smoke dispersion from wildland fires and the effects of wildfires on the global climate. ARSC’s first supercomputer, a four-processor Cray Y-MP named Denali, came online in 1993. At that time, a Cray was considered one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. Today, with its 3,456 processor cores on 432 nodes, Pingo provides approximately 31.8 teraflops of peak computing power and has 13.5 terabytes of memory and 150 terabytes of shared high-speed storage. “The installation of advanced supercomputing systems at UAF increases Alaska’s competitive edge in providing high performance computing resources to a worldwide community of researchers,” Williams said. ARSC has a history of naming Cray supercomputing systems with arctic themes. A pingo is an earth-covered frozen hill. Pingos tend to form in permafrost environments and can reach heights of up to 230 feet. “In the Arctic, a pingo is the result of expansion; arctic soil is lifted up by the action of permafrost,” said UAF Chancellor Rogers. He went on to say that along the arctic coastal plain, where there are no pingos, it’s a virtual flatland. “When you have a pingo, you can get up higher, see much farther, and understand what’s happening in new ways, “ he said. “Pingo is an appropriate name for the new supercomputer….expanding the center, lifting up faculty for new discoveries.” ARSC is the sole provider of open-research computing capabilities for the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program. Supercomputers at ARSC are acquired through the DoD HPC modernization program. Supercomputing resources at ARSC are used by researchers within the U.S. Defense Department, the University of Alaska and other organizations throughout the world to advance scientific discovery for national competitiveness, global security and economic success. In addition to atmospheric studies, projects include creating models that predict the force and direction of tsunami waves, marine ecosystem changes and their effects on the Alaska fishing industry, and the potential for a summer ice-free Arctic Ocean by 2013. ARSC provides high performance computing systems, data storage systems, visualization, software, security and high-bandwidth communications in support of research identified as critical state and national priorities. ARSC computational scientists and HPC systems specialists provide training for new and existing users, tailored consulting and support for successful use of ARSC resources to address computing needs beyond the capabilities of conventional computers. The center is also an active collaborator with HPC users and parallel computing experts worldwide to provide early adoption and assessment of software tools.
|
|||
| Challenges Index | |||
