IBM Sequoia
Sequoia is a petascale Blue Gene/Q supercomputer being constructed by IBM for the National Nuclear Security Administration as part of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC). It is scheduled to be delivered to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2011 and fully deployed in 2012.[1]
When the plans for the IBM Sequoia were revealed in February 2009, the targeted performance of 20 petaflops was more than the combined performance of the top 500 supercomputers of the time. The 20 petaflops target will make Sequoia almost twice as fast as the current record-holding, 10.51 petaflops K computer and equal to the intended performance of the Cray Titan.
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[edit] Dawn prototype
IBM has also built a smaller prototype called "Dawn," capable of 500 teraflops, using the Blue Gene/P design, to evaluate the Sequoia design. This system was delivered in April 2009 and entered the Top500 list at 9th place in June 2009.[2]
[edit] Purpose
Sequoia will be used primarily for nuclear weapons simulation, replacing the current Blue Gene/L and ASC Purple supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Sequoia will also be available for scientific purposes like astronomy, energy, studying of the human genome, and climate change.
[edit] Design
[edit] Node architecture
Sequoia will be of Blue Gene/Q design, building off previous Blue Gene designs. It will consist of 98,304 compute nodes comprising 1.6 million processor cores and 1.6 PB memory in 96 racks covering an area of about 3,000 square feet (280 m2). The processors are to be 16- or 8-core Power Architecture processors built on a 45 nm fabrication process.
[edit] Job scheduler
LLNL is going to use the SLURM job scheduler, which is also used by the Dawn prototype and China's Tianhe-IA, to manage Sequoia's resources.[3]
[edit] Filesystem
LLNL plans to deploy Lustre as the parallel filesystem, and has ported ZFS to Linux as the Lustre OSD (Object Storage Device) to take advantage of the performance and advanced features of the filesystem.[4]
In Sept 2011, NetApp announced that DoE has selected the company for 55 PB of storage.[5]
[edit] Power usage
The complete system will draw about 6 MW of power but is projected to have an unprecedented efficiency in performance per watt. The Sequoia design will perform 3000 Mflops/watt, about 7 times as efficient as the Blue Gene/P design it is replacing, and more than 3 times as efficient as the current (as of June 2011) Top 500 leader.[6][7]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ NNSA awards IBM contract to build next generation supercomputer
- ^ Dawn Ranking History
- ^ Multi-Petascale Computing on the Sequoia Architecture
- ^ ZFS on Linux for Lustre
- ^ U.S. Department of Energy Selects NetApp as the Storage Foundation for One of the World’s Most Powerful Supercomputers
- ^ The Top500 List - June 2011
- ^ The Green500 List - June 2011
