One of the engineering challenges of the SKA is that its computing requirements
exceed that which is available today.
Part of the jigsaw puzzle is about to fall in place with the Australian
government announcing yesterday the procurement of a 1.2 Petaflop
Cray Cascade
supercomputer which will be installed at the Pawsey Center in Perth.
A Peta is 1 x 10 to the power of 15.
Cray describe the machine as their "
Next Generation Supercomputer".
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Cray Inc
Cascade is Cray's next-generation supercomputer. Currently under development, the Cascade system will be capable of sustained multi-petaflops performance on real-world applications and features a hybrid architecture combining multiple processor technologies, a high performance network and a high performance computing-optimized operating system and programming environment supporting high productivity computing.
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iVEC is an organization devoted to providing supercomuting capacity to
Western Australian researchers and is a joint venture between CSIRO and
WA's four public universities. iVEC and CSIRO manage the Pawsey
supercomputer center.
In a
press release, iVEC announced -
Quote:
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Originally Posted by iVEC
The installation of the supercomputer will occur in two phases scheduled for June 2013 and June 2014.
The Pawsey Centre supercomputer will be a Cray Cascade system with partitions for multi-purpose research and real-time processing of radio astronomy data. In 2013 it will have a combined performance of 0.3 petaflops, or 300 trillion 14 digit numerical calculations per second. In 2014 this will be expanded to more than 1.2 petaflops, using a combination of Intel Ivy Bridge, Haswell and MIC processors, although the precise configuration is still to be determined.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by iVEC
The value of the supercomputer purchase represents $33m of the $80m Australian Government SuperScience initiative to establish the Pawsey Centre.
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Also purchased were components from SGI and Oracle and the system will be interfaced via dark fiber cables leased
from the National Broadband Network which run to the correlators at the Murchison antenna site.
The Cascade is Cray's first supercomputer based on next generation Intel Xenon processors.
Only last month, on 18th June, Intel announced its new Xenon Phi co-processor. Cray simultaneously
announced that the Cascade would include the Xenon Phi along with the Xeon CPU in its architecture.
The Xenon Phi took five years to design and is currently only in alpha-test pre-production but can provide teraflop performance on
a single chip. It employs 22nm fabrication technology and 3D Tri-gate transistors. Each chip has 50 computing
cores, what Intel refer to a their
Many Integrated Core Architecture or MIC, and is designed for high degrees of parallelism.
At the International Supercomputer Conference in Hamburg, HPC.com interviewed James Reinders on the new Xenon Phi
and that video appears here -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiiuvOxFUM0
You can also read more about the Xenon Phi here on a Jun 18th blog on Intel's web site -
http://blogs.intel.com/technology/20...nd-innovation/
The Cray Cascade will use a Linux software environment.
One exciting upshot of technologies such as the Xenon Phi is that it will
make its way into home computing. Gamers out there would no doubt salivate
at the prospect of co-processors providing multi teraflop performance with
their machines networked to others in the country via a 100Mb/s optical fiber.
Over the course of the SKA's life, it will be fascinating to watch the continued
pace of high performance computing technology and whether it will keep up
with the project's thirst for computing cycles and data storage.
SKA News - next generation Cray Cascade supercomputer to be installed in Perth
hmm stacking a few million images would be seconds of work haha
