Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 3
National Center for Supercomputing
Applications
William Kramer, Michelle Butler, Gregory Bauer, Kalyana
Chadalavada, and Celso Mendes
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, National Center for Supercomputing
Applications
3.1
The Blue Waters Computational and Analysis Subsystems :::::
18
3.2
Blue Waters On-line Storage Subsystem ::::::::::::::::::::::::
19
3.2.1
On-line Storage Performance ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
22
3.3
Blue Waters Near-line Storage Subsystem and External Server
Subsystem :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
24
3.4
Blue Waters Applications ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
28
3.4.1
Science and Engineering Team Application I/O
Requirements ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
29
3.5
Conclusion ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
31
Bibliography ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
31
Blue Waters, a joint project funded by the National Science Foundation Ad-
vanced CyberInfrastructure Division, the State of Illinois, and the University
of Illinois, is an exceptionally well balanced, sustained petascale system dedi-
cated to solving a diverse range of unique science and engineering challenges
that require huge amounts of sustained computational and data analysis per-
formance. The Blue Waters system was the highest performing and largest
storage system at the time of its installation and will likely be for some time
after. Blue Waters has 1.66 PB of aggregate memory, which is more than
any other known system to date. The challenging investigations for Blue Wa-
ters require not just billions of core hours of computational time but extreme
amounts of storage and I/O performance as well. Approximately 70 science
and engineering teams (SETs) are using Blue Waters at the time of this writ-
ing with about 30 \major teams" that have allocations ranging from 30 million
to almost 5 billion AMD integer core hours. The SETs cross many disciplines
including astrophysics, chemistry, climate, computational bio-medicine, com-
putational biology, cosmology, engineering optimization of very large systems,
fluid dynamics, molecular dynamics, physics, solar storms, seismology and
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