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Supercomputing Center awarded a really fast one
Friday, August 04, 2000 By Byron Spice, Science Editor, Post-Gazette
The world's fastest computer outside of a nuclear weapons lab will be built in Pittsburgh, beginning this fall.
An amalgam of 682 computers with 2,728 high-speed processors, the supercomputer will be capable of performing up to 6 trillion calculations each second -- a speed computer scientists refer to as 6 teraflops.
The speed is difficult to comprehend; every man, woman and child on Earth would have to perform 1,000 calculations every second to keep pace with the machine's peak speed. But researchers insist this is necessary for performing such complex calculations as storm prediction, earthquake modeling and "tele-immersion," which would allow people in distant locations to interact as if they were in the same room.
The National Science Board yesterday approved a three-year, $45 million award to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. It will work with Compaq Computer Corp. to assemble the Terascale Computing System at the Westinghouse Energy Center in Monroeville.
Plans already are in the works to boost the speed to 20 teraflops in a couple of years.
"This investment will accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering," President Clinton said in a statement released by the National Science Foundation, "allowing us to better predict tornadoes, speed up the discovery of life-saving drugs and design more fuel-efficient engines."
The only comparable computers are installed at U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, where they are used to simulate nuclear explosions. The world's fastest, at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., has achieved a peak speed of 3 teraflops. The U.S. Department of Energy in June announced that a 12 teraflop IBM computer will be built at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, co-chaired by Carnegie Mellon University's Raj Reddy, last year insisted that scientists doing nonclassified work needed access to similar machines.
Back in the fold
Yesterday's award marks a turnaround in the fortunes for the Pittsburgh center, a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh and Westinghouse Electric established in the mid-1980s. It lost its National Science Foundation funding of about $15 million annually in 1998 when the federal agency decided to concentrate its efforts on two advanced computing "partnerships" -- networks of computers linked to two other supercomputing centers, one in San Diego and one in Urbana-Champaign, Ill.
"It has always been my belief that the PSC is one of the crown jewels of Western Pennsylvania," said U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Swissvale, a member of the House Science Committee. "This award will prove significant in allowing them to continue to shine as a world leader in high-performance computing."
"Pittsburgh's always had a very good reputation with our user community," said Bob Borchers, director of the foundation's advanced computer infrastructure division. Its co-directors, Pitt's Ralph Roskies and Carnegie Mellon's Michael Levine, are both physicists, not computer scientists, and keep their focus on doing science, he said. "The users love 'em."
The Pittsburgh center, which receives $2 million annually from the state, continued operating after losing its foundation support. It put together an annual budget of $10 million to $12 million by maintaining its funding from the National Institutes of Health and increasing its work for other users, notably the Department of Energy.
The Terascale Computing System provided an opportunity to bring the center back into the foundation fold, Borchers said. Pittsburgh has been adept at breaking in new machines -- both its Cray T3D and T3E computers were the first ones off the production line -- so it was a natural choice for building a new, one-of-a-kind computer.
"We have a proven track record of taking new technology and applying it to high-performance, technical computing for the science community," Levine said. "There is, to some degree, an art to that."
But first they had to win the contract. Last year, Doyle inserted language into legislation to ensure that the National Science Foundation would have an open competition, rather than work through its existing supercomputing centers.
Five groups submitted proposals. "Pittsburgh won, fair and square," Borchers said, though he would release few details. The National Science Board, the foundation's governing body, discussed the proposals and approved the Pittsburgh plan in closed session yesterday.
In contrast to the supercomputers of a decade ago, which used customized chips and exotic liquid-cooling systems, the new high-end computers use largely off-the-shelf components. They are able to achieve tremendous processing speeds by using thousands of computer processors, breaking up large, complex problems into smaller bits that can be solved simultaneously by the interlinked processors.
Pittsburgh's terascale computer will use 682 of the next generation of Compaq's AlphaServer computer, each of which contains four computer processors. In addition to a 6-teraflop peak speed, the computer will draw on 2.7 trillion bytes, or terabytes, of random access memory, will have 50 terabytes of online hard-disk storage and another 300 terabytes of additional tape or disk storage.
Available technology
In some ways, the new computer will give high-end users the advantages of technology already available to personal computer users. The new Alpha chips will have an equivalent of the MMX technology found on Intel's Pentium chips -- the ability to simultaneously manipulate multiple pixels in computer images.
Borchers said the science foundation plans to issue another award next year to build a second terascale facility using technology from a different vendor. If Congress approves proposals now in the fiscal 2002 budget proposal, both of the terascale computers would be upgraded to 20 teraflops.
The new Pittsburgh computer will begin operation next February, operating at speeds of about half a teraflop, and would reach its peak performance when all of the AlphaServers are in place by the end of the year.
The new burst of computer speed will be welcomed by certain users, such as meteorologists who track and model storms in Oklahoma's Tornado Alley and Carnegie Mellon engineers who study earthquakes and whose needs have outstripped the capabilities of existing computers.
The terascale computer, however, also will open up new areas of research, for which computational demands are so intensive that no one has seriously pursued them. For instance, computing speed has limited the efforts of Takeo Kanade, director of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, in his work on "virtualized reality." This is a technique for using dozens of video cameras to capture an event such as a basketball game or an open-heart operation and recreate it in the computer, where viewers could view it from whatever angle or perspective they might choose.
Similarly, Jaron Lanier, the California researcher who first coined the phrase "virtual reality," is heading the National Tele-Immersion Initiative, a consortium of 160 universities. Tele-immersion would allow people who are in distant locations to interact with each other as if they were in the same room. These and other applications that demand rapid image processing are part of the push to achieve greater computational speed, Borchers said.
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