And...
--
Imagine 1,000 trillion ops per second
The new supercomputer being designed by
Compaq, Celera Genomics and Sandia
National Labs promises to be eight times
faster than the quickest existing machine.
By Stephen Shankland and Erich Luening, Special to
ZDNet
January 19, 2001 12:25 PM PT
Compaq Computer is teaming with nuclear
research facility Sandia National Laboratories and
biotechnology company Celera Genomics to build
what is anticipated to be one of the fastest
supercomputers in the world.
The deal, announced Friday at a Department of Energy
news conference in Washington, will result in a
computer that can perform 100 trillion calculations per
second--100 "teraflops"--by 2004, Bill Blake, vice
president of high-performance technical computing at
Compaq, said in an interview. A second phase, which
will be open to other bidders besides Compaq, will
result in a "petaflop" machine 10 times faster, the same
speed as the Blue Gene machine under design at IBM.
Supercomputer
The machine will benefit from computer hardware and
software research from all three partners, Blake said.
The computer will be used to extract medically useful
information from raw databases of genetic information,
but Sandia officials said the advances also will benefit
the nation's nuclear weapons program.
The deal is one of a series of major contracts for
Compaq, whose Unix computers using the Alpha chip
are selling well with technical customers but not as well
with commercial buyers who prefer computers from Sun
Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and IBM.
Other major Compaq (NYSE: CPQ) victories include a
$36 million partnership with the Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center to build a 2,728-CPU machine
for academic use and ASCI Q, a $200 million nuclear
weapons simulation machine with 12,000 CPUs to be
built at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Supercomputer competition
Compaq must reckon with competitor Sun (Nasdaq:
SUNW), which is trying to convert its business success
into supercomputer success, and IBM (NYSE: IBM),
which has jumped into the top spot in supercomputer
popularity and speed rankings and has the current
fastest machine, a $110 million, 8,192-CPU machine
that can perform 12.3 teraflops, about one-eighth the
projected speed of the upcoming Compaq machine.
Houston-based Compaq is also developing a
supercomputer for the Department of Energy's National
Nuclear Security Administration, which is expected to
be able to perform 30 trillion operations per second
once delivered in 2002.
Rockville, Md.-based Celera for years competed with
the federally funded Human Genome Project to compile
a map of human genetic information. The two efforts
joined forces at the last minute, and now Celera and
other companies are trying to benefit from the research.
The new supercomputer will help in further genomics
research and the study of the structure, function and
interactions of proteins in the cells of humans and other
organisms, according to a joint press release.
Celera will provide applications that life science
researchers can use in their work, such as further
mapping of the human genome and other biological
research.
Although terms of the agreement were not disclosed,
the three companies plan to spend millions of dollars,
employ hundreds of workers, and develop new
technology as part of the effort, scheduled to be
completed in 2004.
At the press conference Friday, government officials,
researchers and industry executives hailed the
supercomputer as the next step in the Human Genome
Project.
Advancing human health
With years of experience building computer models of
nuclear explosions, Sandia will assist Celera in building
software to analyze biological data.
The supercomputer will help "to advance the knowledge
from the human genome to improve human health," said
Sandia President Paul Robinson. "Nothing beats the
complexity of the Human Genome Project and the
opportunities ahead. We look forward to working in
these fields."
For Compaq, the deal is an example of its ongoing
push to add servers and other high-end computing
products to its successful PC business.
"Compaq has been reforming itself into providing
computer and Internet technology to a whole span of
different fields," said Compaq Vice President Bill Blake.
"Part of this move from the desktop to the
supercomputer has been with these partners."
The new supercomputer likely will have 10,000 to
20,000 CPUs, Blake said. That number is sufficiently
large that the system designers must grapple with
reliability problems not seen in typical business
machines, even those with a few dozen CPUs.
"You start out on the basis that something will always
be broken in the system somewhere," Blake said. Then
designers build monitoring and job scheduling features
that make sure jobs are reassigned to functioning
CPUs if one fails.
The Compaq machine will take advantage of future
Compaq Alpha chip designs that build networking
abilities straight into the chip itself, Blake said in the
interview. This feature will allow more CPUs to
communicate directly with each other or to route shared
information along from one chip to another as fast as
possible.
"We're optimizing a special form of network between all
the Alphas," Blake said.
This architecture varies considerably from that used by
IBM, which prefers to have a smaller number of nodes,
each with multiple CPUs and connected to central
high-speed switches. |
