Petascale
Encyclopedia
In computing
, petascale refers to a computer system capable of reaching performance in excess of one petaflop
, i.e. one quadrillion
floating point
operations per second
. The standard benchmark tool is LINPACK
and Top500.org
is the organisation which tracks the fastest supercomputers. Some uniquely specialized petascale computers do not rank on the Top500 list since they cannot run LINPACK. This makes comparisons to ordinary supercomputers hard.
Petascale can also refer to very large storage systems where the capacity exceeds one petabyte
(PB).
and climate simulation, nuclear simulations, cosmology
, quantum chemistry
, lower-level organism brain simulation, and fusion
science.
is responsible for initiating and funding several petascale computers in the USA, as well as DARPA who gave IBM
the contract to develop the petascale PERCS
(Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computer System) platform.
China
has developed two petascale computers, Nebulae
and Tianhe-I
.
Other countries, such as Germany
and Japan
, have plans of their own for petascale computers.
Petascale computers are under development from manufacturers such as Sun Microsystems
, Cray
, IBM
, Dawning
, SGI
, and NEC
.
Computing
Computing is usually defined as the activity of using and improving computer hardware and software. It is the computer-specific part of information technology...
, petascale refers to a computer system capable of reaching performance in excess of one petaflop
FLOPS
In computing, FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second...
, i.e. one quadrillion
Quadrillion
Quadrillion may mean either of the two numbers :* 1,000,000,000,000,000 – for all short scale countries; increasingly common meaning in English language usage* 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – for all...
floating point
Floating point
In computing, floating point describes a method of representing real numbers in a way that can support a wide range of values. Numbers are, in general, represented approximately to a fixed number of significant digits and scaled using an exponent. The base for the scaling is normally 2, 10 or 16...
operations per second
Second
The second is a unit of measurement of time, and is the International System of Units base unit of time. It may be measured using a clock....
. The standard benchmark tool is LINPACK
LINPACK
LINPACK is a software library for performing numerical linear algebra on digital computers. It was written in Fortran by Jack Dongarra, Jim Bunch, Cleve Moler, and Gilbert Stewart, and was intended for use on supercomputers in the 1970s and early 1980s...
and Top500.org
TOP500
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year...
is the organisation which tracks the fastest supercomputers. Some uniquely specialized petascale computers do not rank on the Top500 list since they cannot run LINPACK. This makes comparisons to ordinary supercomputers hard.
Petascale can also refer to very large storage systems where the capacity exceeds one petabyte
Petabyte
A petabyte is a unit of information equal to one quadrillion bytes, or 1000 terabytes. The unit symbol for the petabyte is PB...
(PB).
Applications
Petascale computing will be used to do advanced computations in fields such as weatherWeather forecasting
Weather forecasting is the application of science and technology to predict the state of the atmosphere for a given location. Human beings have attempted to predict the weather informally for millennia, and formally since the nineteenth century...
and climate simulation, nuclear simulations, cosmology
Cosmology
Cosmology is the discipline that deals with the nature of the Universe as a whole. Cosmologists seek to understand the origin, evolution, structure, and ultimate fate of the Universe at large, as well as the natural laws that keep it in order...
, quantum chemistry
Quantum chemistry
Quantum chemistry is a branch of chemistry whose primary focus is the application of quantum mechanics in physical models and experiments of chemical systems...
, lower-level organism brain simulation, and fusion
Nuclear fusion
Nuclear fusion is the process by which two or more atomic nuclei join together, or "fuse", to form a single heavier nucleus. This is usually accompanied by the release or absorption of large quantities of energy...
science.
Development
The National Science FoundationNational Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
is responsible for initiating and funding several petascale computers in the USA, as well as DARPA who gave IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
the contract to develop the petascale PERCS
PERCS
PERCS , officially known as the Power 775, is IBM's answer to DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems initiative....
(Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computer System) platform.
China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
has developed two petascale computers, Nebulae
Nebulae (computer)
Nebulae is a petascale supercomputer located at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. Built from a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel Xeon X5650 processors and Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPUs, it has a peak performance of 1.271 petaflops using the LINPACK benchmark suite...
and Tianhe-I
Tianhe-I
Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 , in English, "Milky Way Number One", is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax of 2.566 petaFLOPS...
.
Other countries, such as Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
and Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
, have plans of their own for petascale computers.
Petascale computers are under development from manufacturers such as Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
, Cray
Cray
Cray Inc. is an American supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. , was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray. Seymour Cray went on to form the spin-off Cray Computer Corporation , in 1989, which went bankrupt in 1995,...
, IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
, Dawning
Dawning Information Industry
Dawning Information Industry is a supercomputer manufacturer in the People's Republic of China. Its Dawning 4000A and Dawning 5000A clusters were both ranked tenth in June 2004 and November 2008 TOP500 lists respectively...
, SGI
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
, and NEC
NEC
, a Japanese multinational IT company, has its headquarters in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. NEC, part of the Sumitomo Group, provides information technology and network solutions to business enterprises, communications services providers and government....
.
Active
As of January 2011, these are the only known active petascale computers in the world.- Roadrunner, built by IBMIBMInternational Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
, was the first computer to go petascale, and did so on May 25, 2008, with sustained performance of 1.026 petaflops. - XT5Cray XT5The Cray XT5 is an updated version of the Cray XT4 supercomputer, launched on November 6, 2007. It includes a faster version of the XT4's SeaStar2 interconnect router called SeaStar2+, and can be configured either with XT4 compute blades, which have four dual-core AMD Opteron processor sockets, or...
"Jaguar", built by CrayCrayCray Inc. is an American supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. , was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray. Seymour Cray went on to form the spin-off Cray Computer Corporation , in 1989, which went bankrupt in 1995,...
, was the second, later in 2008. After an update in 2009, its performance reached 1.759 petaflops. - NebulaeNebulae (computer)Nebulae is a petascale supercomputer located at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. Built from a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel Xeon X5650 processors and Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPUs, it has a peak performance of 1.271 petaflops using the LINPACK benchmark suite...
built by Dawning, was the third petascale computer and the first built by China with a performance of 1.271 petaflops in 2010. - Tianhe-1A built by NUDT, at 2.566 petaflops in 2010.
- K computerK computerThe K computer – named for the Japanese word , which stands for 10 quadrillion – is a supercomputer being produced by Fujitsu at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan. In June 2011, TOP500 ranked K the world's fastest supercomputer, with a rating...
built by FujitsuFujitsuis a Japanese multinational information technology equipment and services company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is the world's third-largest IT services provider measured by revenues....
, is the fastest supercomputer in the world, at 8.162 petaflops in 2011.
Other
- RIKEN MDGRAPE-3RIKEN MDGRAPE-3MDGRAPE-3 is an ultra-high performance petascale supercomputer system developed by the RIKEN research institute in Japan. It is a special purpose system built for molecular dynamics simulations, especially protein structure prediction....
in Japan which went online in 2006 reaches petascale performance but can't run LINPACK, so comparisons to regular supercomputers are hard.
Under construction
- IBM Blue WatersBlue WatersBlue Waters is the name of a petascale supercomputer to be deployed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign...
-recently ended their partnership - IBM SequoiaIBM SequoiaSequoia 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...
- SGI PleiadesPleiades (supercomputer)Pleiades is a petascale supercomputer built by SGI at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. , it was the world's seventh fastest computer with a peak performance of more than 970 teraflops. After further extensions, Pleiades is scheduled to reach 10 petaflops in 2012.-See...
which went online in 2008, reaching 600 TFLOPS, but will reach petascale in 2009. - JUGENEJUGENEJUGENE is a supercomputer built by IBM for Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany. It is based on the Blue Gene/P and is the successor to the JUBL based on an earlier design. It was at the introduction the second fastest computer in the world. It is currently the ninth fastest computer in the world...
, an upgraded Blue Gene/P system at Jülich Research CentreJülich Research CentreForschungszentrum Jülich GmbH is a member of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres and is one of the largest interdisciplinary research centres in Europe...
in Germany, operational in mid 2009. - Tera 100 is built by BullGroupe Bull-External links:* * — Friends, co-workers and former employees of Bull and Honeywell* *...
for the Military Applications Department (DAM) at the FrenchFranceThe French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
Atomic Energy AuthorityCommissariat à l'Énergie AtomiqueThe Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives or CEA, is a French “public establishment related to industrial and commercial activities” whose mission is to develop all applications of nuclear power, both civilian and military...
(CEA). Operational in 2010.
Platform examples
- Sun Constellation SystemSun Constellation SystemSun Constellation System is an open petascale computing environment introduced by Sun Microsystems in 2007.- Main hardware components :* Sun Blade 6048 Modular System** ** * * * * - Software stack :* OpenSolaris or Linux* Sun Grid Engine...
- IBM Blue Gene/P, Blue Gene/Q and PERCSPERCSPERCS , officially known as the Power 775, is IBM's answer to DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems initiative....
- Cray XT5Cray XT5The Cray XT5 is an updated version of the Cray XT4 supercomputer, launched on November 6, 2007. It includes a faster version of the XT4's SeaStar2 interconnect router called SeaStar2+, and can be configured either with XT4 compute blades, which have four dual-core AMD Opteron processor sockets, or...