Enabling Transformative Research 2014 Annual Report Sustained Petascale in Action: Enabling Transformative Research 2014 Annual Report
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SUSTAINED PETASCALE IN ACTION: ENABLING TRANSFORMATIVE RESEARCH 2014 ANNUAL REPORT SUSTAINED PETASCALE IN ACTION: ENABLING TRANSFORMATIVE RESEARCH 2014 ANNUAL REPORT Editor Nicole Gaynor Art Director Paula Popowski Designers Alexandra Dye Steve Duensing Editorial Board William Kramer Cristina Beldica The research highlighted in this book is part of the Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing project, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (awards OCI-0725070 and ACI-1238993) and the state of Illinois. Blue Waters is a joint effort of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Visit https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/science-teams for the latest on Blue Waters- enabled science and to watch the 2014 Blue Waters Symposium presentations. ISBN 978-0-9908385-1-7 A MESSAGE FROM BILL KRAMER TABLE OF CONTENTS Welcome to the Blue Waters Annual Report for how Blue Waters serves as a bridge to even more 3 A MESSAGE FROM BILL KRAMER 2014! powerful computers in the future. This book captures the first year of Blue Waters continues its commitment to 4 WHAT IS BLUE WATERS? full production on Blue Waters since the building the next generation of our workforce by 5 BLUE WATERS SYMPOSIUM 2014 supercomputer started full service on April recruiting dozens of graduate and undergraduate 2, 2013. We’ve had a great year, with many students into our education programs. For many 6 COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT & EDUCATION researchers transforming knowledge in their of these students this is their first exposure to respective fields. supercomputing, but some, such as our Blue 8 MEASURING BLUE WATERS As of this writing, we have 124 science teams Waters Fellows, have decided to base their entire from well over 50 institutions and organizations careers on advanced modeling and simulation 14 SYMPOSIUM WORKING GROUP REPORTS using NSF’s most powerful system. Many of these or data analytics. teams have worked with our Blue Waters staff to As we compiled this report, the scale of 22 EXTENDED ABSTRACTS ensure that their research runs as productively achievement that this project enabled became as possible, whether that means optimizing the apparent. We are proud to have been a part of 22 space science code or implementing new resource or storage it and look forward to continuing our services management methods. for more and bigger science and engineering for 46 geoscience Blue Waters has provided exceptional service years to come. 66 physics & engineering to the nation’s science, engineering, and research communities. With a balanced and integrated 94 computer science & engineering system with very high sustained computational performance, extraordinary analytical 104 biology & chemistry capabilities, very large memory, world-leading storage capacity and performance, leadership- William C. Kramer 144 social science, economics, & humanities level networking, and an advanced service Project Director & Principal Investigator architecture, the Blue Waters system and staff are 152 REFERENCES KB = kilobytes empowering teams across all NSF directorates to 160 INDEX TB = terabytes do breakthrough science that would otherwise PB = petabytes be impossible. I/O = input/output In May 2014, science and engineering partners, Mnh = million node hours staff, and others associated with the Blue Waters project met face-to-face at the 2014 Blue Waters Allocations denoted as type/ Symposium. Not only did the researchers talk size in extended abstracts. about their accomplishments on the already- existing massive machine, but we also discussed 3 WHAT IS BLUE BLUE WATERS WATERS? SYMPOSIUM 2014 Blue Waters is one of the most powerful Compare this to a typical laptop, which has On May 12, 2014, Blue Waters supercomputer Laboratory at Virginia Tech, said he simulated BACKGROUND supercomputers in the world and the fastest one processor—1/16 of an XE node—with 4 GB users and many of the NCSA staff who support one scenario of disease propagation for the entire IMAGE: supercomputer at a university. It can complete of memory and half a terabyte of storage. their work converged in Champaign, Illinois, for U.S. population for four months in just 12 seconds Paul Woodward more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second To backup or store data from the file systems the second annual Blue Waters Symposium. The using 352,000 cores. He estimated that the world gave a talk on on a sustained basis and more than 13 times that for longer periods, a nearline tape environment ensuing three days were filled with what many of population would take 6-10 minutes per scenario, his work related at peak speed. The peak speed is almost 3 million was built using Spectra Logic T-Finity tape them would later refer to as a wonderful variety though he emphasized that a realistic assessment to stellar times faster than the average laptop. libraries, a DDN disk cache, and IBM's HPSS. of science talks and opportunities for networking of disease threat would require many such runs. hydrodynamics. The machine architecture balances processing This system provides over 300 PB of usable and collaboration. speed with data storage, memory, and storage (380 PB raw). communication within itself and to the outside The supercomputer lives in a 20,000-square- SHARED EVENINGS, COMMON world in order to cater to the widest variety foot machine room, nearly a quarter of the EFFICIENT DISCOVERY THROUGH GOALS SUPERCOMPUTING possible of research endeavors. Many of the floor space in the 88,000-square-foot National The most popular speaker of the symposium projects that use Blue Waters would be difficult Petascale Computing Facility (NPCF) on the The science talks ranged from high-energy was Irene Qualters, the director of the NSF or impossible to do elsewhere. western edge of the University of Illinois at physics to molecular dynamics to climate science Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. She Blue Waters is supported by the National Urbana-Champaign campus. and even political science. Blue Waters enables spoke Thursday morning about the future of Science Foundation (NSF) and the University NPCF achieved Gold Certification in the U.S. more efficient progress in science, summarized supercomputing at NSF and encouraged users of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the National Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy Paul Woodward, professor of astronomy at the to work with NSF to ensure that the future of QUICK FACTS: Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, University of Minnesota. Researchers can run supercomputing met their needs. The symposium Blue Waters manages the Blue Waters project and provides which is the recognized standard for measuring simulations quickly and then have more time to and NCSA’s Private Sector Program (PSP) annual users include: expertise to help scientists and engineers take sustainability in construction. The facility uses draw meaning from the results while someone meeting met for dinner Tuesday at Allerton Park 124 teams and full advantage of the system. three on-site cooling towers to provide water else runs their simulations. Ed Seidel, director of and Wednesday at Memorial Stadium, combining 719 researchers. Cray Inc. supplied the hardware: 22,640 Cray chilled by Mother Nature a large part of the NCSA, added that big computing and big data the most advanced computational science and XE6 nodes and 4,224 Cray XK7 nodes that year, reducing the amount of energy needed to will revolutionize science, whether physical industry teams in the country, according to Seidel. Symposium include NVIDIA graphics processor acceleration. provide cooling. The facility also reduces power or social, by making possible the formerly Seidel remarked after Wednesday’s dinner that attendees: 187. The XE6 nodes boast 64 GB of memory per node conversion losses by running 480 volt AC power impossible. Many problems are too complex to he heard a common need from PSP and Blue and the XK7s have 32 GB of memory. to compute systems, and operates continually at solve without such resources. Waters partners: an all-around system that not Blue Waters’ three file systems (home, project, the high end of the American Society of Heating, A few talks touched on social sciences that only can run simulations, but also analyze and and scratch) provide room for over 26 PB of Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers initially seem incongruous with supercomputing. visualize data. online storage with a combined 1 TB/s read/write standards for efficiency. For example, Shaowen Wang, director of the new Science talks throughout the symposium rate for quick access while jobs are running. The CyberGIS Center at the University of Illinois at bespoke the advances that Blue Waters enabled. three file systems are assembled around Cray's Urbana-Champaign, is leading an exploration Additionally, researchers envisaged what they Sonexion Lustre appliances. The scratch file into minimizing bias in voting districts. Later in could achieve with the next generation of system is the largest and fastest file systems Cray the same session, Keith Bisset, research scientist supercomputers, looking toward the future of has ever provided. at the Network Dynamics & Simulations Science large-scale computing. 4 5 WHATCOMMUNITY IS BLUE at institutions across the country to participate. BLUE WATERS STUDENT Each course includes a syllabus with learning INTERNSHIP PROGRAM outcomes, 40 hours of instruction, reading The Blue Waters Student Internship Program assignments, homework and exercises, and is designed to immerse undergraduate and WATERS?ENGAGEMENT assessment of learning progress. graduate students in research projects associated Other courses include Parallel Algorithm with Blue Waters and/or the Extreme Science and Techniques in fall 2014 (Wen-Mei Hwu, Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) & EDUCATION efforts. Twenty one students were selected for and High Performance Visualization for Large- 2014-2015. The students attended a two-week Scale Scientific Data Analytics in spring 2015 institute in late spring 2014 to ensure they were (Han-Wei Shen, The Ohio State University).