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October 19, 2011 |
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Of SuperHEROES and Superpowers in Supercomputing
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Last June, in the midst of a nation reeling from the most devastating natural disasters in its nearly 3,000-year history, the high performance computing (HPC) industry quaked in its own surprise with the debut of the newest leader on the Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputer — the “K-Computer” at the Advanced Institute for Computation Sciences (AICS) at RIKEN Center in Kobe, Japan.
RIKEN's “K-Computer” presented the HPC industry with nothing
less than its own Tsunami effect. The RIKEN team, led by
Dr.
Kimihiko Hirao,
Director of the Planning Office for the Advanced Institute for Computational
Science, and Deputy Director of Next-Generation Supercomputer R&D Center
at RIKEN, was able to deliver nothing short of a miracle with the system itself,
in addition to displacing the top Chinese Tianhe-1A system from the number one
position China had hoped to maintain for several iterations of the biannual Top
500 release.
The “K-Computer” was a stunning victory for all of Japan and testament to a nation's character in the face of rolling outages and interruption to supply chains, coupled with the infrastructure and human impacts that effected the entire country throughout the system build and test period, to make the June announcement. It was also a grand challenge wake-up call for every other nation leading the charge in supercomputing development. The “K-Computer” is not just “big” in scale, but as elegant in its design as it is in its sheer performance and efficiency. All that, amongst all of these challenges, and already well ahead of its initial delivery and production schedule.
At the center of all of these efforts is Dr. Hirao. He and his team have been working tirelessly for the last several years, in partnership with Fujitsu, leading a large consortium and national initiative to deliver the nation's first 10 PETAFLOP system and to define future research activities to continue to drive advancements in computational and computer sciences in supercomputing.
What makes Dr. Hirao and RIKEN'S accomplishment even that much more incredible is in understanding what it takes to stand up a program and system of this magnitude in terms of the length of time and complexity involved in this level of scale. It is not trivial. In the best of times, bringing a system of “K's” magnitude (672 racks) online takes months, followed by weeks of initial testing and acceptance. Once the system is stabilized, it generally takes several additional weeks to run the Linpack test suite.
Factor into that all of the unplanned challenges Dr. Hirao and his team had to reconsider following the disaster in March, followed by reduced power supply and numerous other barriers, and they still managed to overtake the top position of the top systems in the world by June. It takes great leadership and a great team in the best of times. Collectively, Dr. Hirao, his RIKEN team and Fujitsu’s delivery of the world's leading supercomputer is a testament to the heart and spirit of Japan.
Then there is the “K-Computer” itself. Nothing short of 8.162 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second) of sustained magnificence! It is pure, delicious, performance and promises to ring in the revitalization of supercomputing in the race to Exascale. It left the technology industry virtually “gob-smacked” not just for its base performance, but that it was designed solely around the SPARC architecture and delivered more performance than the remaining top five systems combined. No accelerator add-ins, just pure processor performance. The “K-Computer” features 68,544 processors (548,352 cores) which is almost double any other system and is more powerful than the next five systems on the list combined. What is most spectacular is its minimal power consumption of 9.89 megawatts for a system of this magnitude and performance. The question that remains is: What does that mean for the coming November list and the ability for competing nations and technologies to overtake RIKEN'S supremacy?
For Dr. Hirao and the whole of the Japanese research community, the “K-Computer” represents a triumph by orders of magnitude and will clearly be a central focus to the upcoming SC11 conversations in Seattle. Attendees for the November conference can look forward to many sessions and exhibits centering on Japan's new stronghold in the supercomputing arena including representation from each of the High Performance Computing Infrastructure (HPCI) consortium members representing Japan's leading research and academic institutes. The technical program promises to be infused with current findings as a result of initial testing with the K-Computer that will become broadly available to all researchers by November 2012.
Looking to the future, Dr. Hirao's efforts will continue to push the third pillar of computing, centering on simulation, which has become as critical to scientific discovery as experiment and theory. For the RIKEN HIPC consortium, access to the petascale platform promises a new era of modeling in support of the vision of Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology to deliver groundbreaking impacts in fields ranging from global climate research and meteorology to disaster prevention and medicine.
Dr. Hirao will continue his efforts in establishing Centers of Excellence (COE) in the field of supercomputing, open to individuals from all over the world from different backgrounds. The new petascale system will enable researchers to simulate physical processes on a scale never before seen, and approach convergence for dynamical processes never thought possible. For Dr. Hirao, petascale computing opens up new frontiers, and its success will have lasting impact on science and technology and people all around the world for generations into the future.
– CE Stevens
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