Superdome operational in CaltechSan Diego 07 March 2001 Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research installed an early access 32-processor Hewlett-Packard Superdome system. First benchmark results are promising, getting a big part of the performance out of the machine.
Caltech is installing and experimenting with successive generations of Hewlett-Packard's parallel computing systems, including the current 128-processor HP V2500 system and the new Superdome. The Superdome has 32 PA8600 2.2 Gflop/s processors. The system has 64 GByte of memory and 1.5 TByte of disk storage. The operating system is 64-bit HP-UX. System software on the Superdome includes MPI, OpenMP, PThreads, shared memory libraries such as MLIB, LAPACK, NAG, PETSc, and BLAS; and F90, C, and C++ compilers. HP provides interactive runtime performance analysis tools, such as CXperf, MPIView, and TotalView, which allow users to profile and analyze collected data.
Tony Leonard, Von Karman Professor of Aeronautics at Caltech, together with Paul Ploumhans used the Superdome to run a computational fluid dynamics code to compute the flow past a sphere at a Reynolds number of 1,000.
Vince McKoy, professor of theoretical chemistry at Caltech, and Carl Winstead, senior research fellow in chemistry, performed a computation of an elastic electron-molecule collision. This analytical evaluation and transformation of electron repulsion integrals demand substantial matrix computations; the application uses Fortran, C, MPI, shared memory directives, and Pthreads. This chemistry code has been instrumental in helping stress test all HP systems (including the XClass and V2500) installed at CACR and was one of the first multi-day production runs successfully completed on the Superdome. Caltech's Virtual Test Facility is an end-to-end, fully 3-D simulation of the detonation of high explosives, shock wave propagation, solid material response to pressure loading, and compressible turbulence. The VTF largely consists of a parallel fluid solver and a parallel solid mechanics package that are coupled together by the exchange of boundary data. The scaling graph below compares the MPI-based, fully Lagrangian solid mechanics solvers versus average execution time per step on the Blue Horizon and the Superdome. Principle Investigator for the Center for Simulation of Dynamic Response of Materials (a DOE/ASCI Center of Excellence) is Dan Meiron, professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Computer Science at Caltech. Application development and porting to the Superdome was performed by Raul Radovitzky, Michael Aivazis, Julian Cummings, Ravi Samtaney, and Sharon Brunett at Caltech.
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