Making a Case for Efficient Supercomputing

ABSTRACT

A supercomputer evokes images of “big iron” and speed; it is the Formula 1 racecar of computing. As we venture forth into the new millennium, however, I argue that efficiency, reliability, and availability will become the dominant issues by the end of this decade, not only for supercomputing, but also for computing in general.

REFERENCES

• 1: 1. Moore, G. Cramming more components onto integrated circuits, Electronics 38, 8 (April 1965).
• 2: 2. When calculating the price/performance ratio, another metric that is sometimes used in conjunction with the performance metric, price is defined to be the cost of acquisition only and does not account for the cost of operation.
• 3: Gordon Bell , Jim Gray, What's next in high-performance computing?, Communications of the ACM, v.45 n.2, p.91-95, February 2002 [doi>10.1145/503124.503129]
• 4: 4. Sterling, T., Becker, D. Savarese, D., Dorband, J. Ranawake, U., and Packer, C. Beowulf: A parallel workstation for scientific computation, Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel Processing (August 1995).
• 5: W. Feng , M. Warren , E. Weigle, The Bladed Beowulf: A Cost-Effective Alternative to Traditional Beowulfs, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, p.245, September 23-26, 2002
• 6: Michael S. Warren , Eric H. Weigle , Wu-Chun Feng, High-density computing: a 240-processor Beowulf in one cubic meter, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing, p.1-11, November 16, 2002, Baltimore, Maryland
• 7: 7. Darling, A., Carey, L., Feng, W. The design, implementation, and evaluation of mpiBLAST, Best Paper: Applications Track, Proceedings of ClusterWorld Conference & Expo (June 2003).
• 8: 8. Karp, A. Speeding up n-body calculations on machines lacking a hardware square root, Scientific Programming, 1, 2 (1992).
• 9: 9. The performance of ASCI Q is extrapolated from the measured performance on a smaller version of the machine with the same architecture. The extrapolation is optimistic; actual performance will likely be somewhat smaller. The power and space numbers for Avalon and Green Destiny are actual measurements, whereas the power and space numbers for the ASCI machines are based on personal communications with system administrators and quoted numbers from the World Wide Web.
• 10: 10. LANL researchers outfit the "Toyota Camry" of supercomputing for bioinformatics tasks, BioInform/ GenomeWeb (Feb. 3, 2003).
• 11: Michael S. Warren , Timothy C. Germann , Peter S. Lomdahl , David M. Beazley , John K. Salmon, Avalon: an Alpha/Linux cluster achieves 10 Gflops for $15k, Proceedings of the 1998 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing (CDROM), p.1-11, November 07-13, 1998, San Jose, CA
• 12: 12. If Green Destiny+ had been specified in a full configuration--that is, 1.125 GB of memory per node and 160 GB of disk per node--the memory density and disk density would have increased by an order of magnitude to 187,500 MB per square foot and 6,400 GB per square foot, respectively. These numbers will have tremendous implications to Web-server farms and search-engine farms like Yahoo and Google.
• 13: 13. LINPACK, the benchmark used to rank supercomputers in the Top 500 Supercomputer List (http: //www.top500.org), was chosen because it is the only common benchmark result that we have that has been run across the two different machines--Green Destiny and Japanese Earth Simulator.
• 14: 14. We note again that if Green Destiny+ had been specified in a full configuration--1.125 GB of memory per node and 160 GB of disk per node--the memory density and disk density would have increased by an order of magnitude to 187,500 MB per square foot and 6,400 GB per square foot, respectively.
• 15: 15. The Japanese Earth Simulator actually occupies two floors, each 50 meters by 60 meters (or 35,145 square feet) in dimension. Thus, its footprint is effectively 2^* 35,145 = 70,290 square feet.
• 16: 16. Bell, Gordon. Letter to Los Alamos National Laboratory, 2003.
• 17: 17. Lakhman, K. Craig Venter goes shopping for bioinformatics to fill his new sequencing center, GenomeWeb, Oct. 16, 2002; http://www.genomeweb.com/articles/ view-article.asp?Article=2002101693617.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Fault tolerance

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Reliability, availability, and serviceability

  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.9 Management
          Subjects: Software configuration management

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.2 Installation Management
          Subjects: Computing equipment management

General Terms:
Economics, Management, Performance, Reliability