EDITORS: A formal ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's Terascale Computing System will take place at 10 a.m. Oct. 29 in Westinghouse Energy Center, Monroeville, Pa. Terascale tours, demonstrations of scientific projects using the system, a Q&A session, and a reception will be part of the events that morning. A media advisory giving details of the ceremony accompanies this release. Should you wish to do an interview before, on, or after Oct. 29 with any of the scientists or officials involved with the Terascale project, phone or e-mail any of the contacts given below.
October 22, 2001RELEASE ON RECEIPTContacts: Michael Schneider, PSC 412/268-4960;[email protected]
John Harvith, University of Pittsburgh 412/624-4380; [email protected]
Teresa Sokol Thomas, Carnegie Mellon 412/268-3580; [email protected]
Vaughn Gilbert, Westinghouse 412/374-3896; [email protected]
Dick Calandrella, Compaq 508/467-2261; dick.[email protected]
The World's Most Powerful Computer System for Open Research--The Terascale, at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC)--Is Up, Running, and Capable of Performing Six Trillion Calculations Per Second.
Severe storm forecasting, earthquake modeling, protein genomics, elementary particle physics, earlier and more reliable diagnoses of diseases, three-dimensional video are all areas of research to be explored with a system that reduces 14 months of continuous computing time to one hour.
A joint effort of the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Westinghouse Electric Company, PSC developed the Terascale in collaboration with Compaq Computer Corporation with funding from the National Science Foundation.
PITTSBURGH--With the power of 10,000 state-of-the-art personal computer processors, the new Terascale Computing System (TCS) at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) is not only the most powerful computer system in the world for unclassified research, but its capabilities also promise revolutionary possibilities in research-from drug discovery to artificial organ development to storm prediction.
Calculations that would take a personal computer more than 14 months of continuous running time will take the new TCS one hour. The TCS, which can perform six trillion calculations per second, is 13 times more powerful than the PSC's present supercomputer, in operation since 1996.
According to PSC's scientific directors- Ralph Roskies, a physics professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and Michael Levine, a physics professor at Carnegie Mellon University-the new system will dramatically accelerate those projects that are possible using current computers, and, more importantly, will make many other calculations possible that were either impossible before, or prohibitively expensive and utterly impractical because of the amount of time required to perform the calculations. "With this unprecedented computer power now being made available to researchers for the first time, we expect to unleash new creative potential from the nation's scientists and engineers," they said.
A joint effort of the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Westinghouse Electric Company, PSC developed and implemented TCS in collaboration with Compaq Computer Corporation with funding from the National Science Foundation.
The TCS provides computational capability to scientists nationwide who will use it in such research areas as:- Severe storm modeling and forecasting that will analyze wind and weather patterns to give civic authorities more advance warning of impending storms and tornadoes;_ Earthquake modeling for civil engineers to design structures that are more able to withstand tremors, and for geologists to discover what locations are at higher risk for severe shaking; _ Human organ modeling, for hearts and lungs;_ Materials design, making products that are harder, less prone to breakage, or that mimic biological materials; - Pathology imaging, to enable earlier and more reliable diagnoses of diseases;_ Protein genomics-modeling that is integral to the development of new drug therapies;_ Functional MRI of brain activity;_ Data analysis of over-the-counter drug sales to predict epidemics;_ Modeling star formation, providing clues to the genesis of galaxies; and_ Elementary particle physics, to discover what holds protons and neutrons together.
Because the TCS system is a national resource, researchers from across the country are eligible to apply to the PSC for time on their systems. In addition to researchers at PSC partners University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Westinghouse Electric Company, researchers from virtually all major universities have used the PSC, among them Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Princeton University. Time can also be made available on the computers for proprietary projects from private industry.
"The TCS system at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center continues a history of National Science Foundation support for high-performance computing," said Robert Borchers, former director of NSF's Division of Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research. "Through the NSF's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, this system will increase long-term, fundamental research across all science and engineering disciplines."
"There is growing national and international recognition that university research is at the heart of most commercial innovation and much of our recent economic prosperity," said University of Pittsburgh Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg. "And it is significant that Western Pennsylvania is the home of this great national resource. When great research universities such as Pitt and Carnegie Mellon partner with industry--in this case Westinghouse and Compaq--and the federal government, we are poised to achieve the next great breakthroughs of this new century."
"PSC's success in deploying this unprecedented, very large-scale system right on time is a fine achievement," said Jared L. Cohon, president of Carnegie Mellon University. "This is another important chapter in the center's outstanding record of providing the nation's scientists with the most advanced computational tools. This world-class computing system reflects Pittsburgh's international leadership in technology development and is a key component of our region's technology future."
"In scale alone, the TCS pushes beyond where open-resource supercomputing technology has been before or would have gone without the NSF PACI program," said Levine and Roskies in a joint statement. "Compaq committed itself to the success of the TCS and worked side-by-side with us to make it available on schedule. With storage capacity that's 100,000 times more powerful than most PCs and with 10 million times the communications capability, this system brings significant new research capability to bear on many important problems. While the immediate, direct beneficiaries will be academic scientists, the benefits will flow to the country as a whole, in practical ways we can't forecast."
The TCS represents an unprecedented synthesis of "off-the-shelf" components integrated with an advanced interconnect--from Quadrics Supercomputers World--and other technologies to provide a very large-scale system for scientific computing. It comprises 3,000 Compaq Alpha EV68 microprocessors, housed in 750 four-processor AlphaServer systems running Tru64 UNIX. The latest evolution of the widely used Alpha microchip technology, the EV68 has peak floating-point capability of two gigaflops (two billion calculations per second).
Along with six teraflops of processing power, the TCS features three terabytes of memory, high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnections, and remarkable capabilities for large-scale data handling, including the ability to write the entire memory to disk in under 40 seconds. This extremely short system-write time, developed through PSC systems and software engineering, is critical to efficient checkpointing, needed to preserve research data in the event of component failure.
Preparation for the TCS began in October 2000 with installation of a 256-processor prototype system. In August 2001, the first of the new AlphaServer systems arrived at the PSC computer room at Westinghouse Energy Center in Monroeville. System components came in multiple deliveries from Compaq facilities in Texas and Scotland. An on-site team of Compaq, PSC, and Westinghouse engineers and technicians-- supported by expert teams at Compaq locations in the United States, Bristol, England, and Galway, Ireland--worked aggressively to meet an Oct. 1 installation date.
"PSC is to be congratulated on bringing this powerful new technology into being," said Charlie Pryor, president and CEO of Westinghouse Electric Company. "Westinghouse is proud to add its internationally recognized expertise in management excellence and technology leadership to the team. Once again, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center has demonstrated its leadership in high-performance computing."
"Compaq is proud to join with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the National Science Foundation in delivering TCS," said Bill Blake, Compaq's vice president of high performance technical computing. "And we're excited that Compaq's AlphaServer SC supercomputing architecture will make such a significant contribution in opening new frontiers in scientific computing."
The TCS installation marks the first operation of AlphaServer SC, the system software that ties AlphaServer systems together on this scale and the first large-scale, multi-level Quadrics switch structure that supports thousands of processors while achieving sustained operation across the system. Standard benchmark software has measured system performance over four teraflops. The TCS will next go through a period of "friendly user" testing, and by early 2002, it will become available to researchers nationwide through the peer-review process of the NSF PACI program.
PSC and Compaq collaborated on numerous machine enhancements to improve the performance of the TCS, changes that range from the disk controller and file system to wiring optimizations. By careful site planning and redesign of the AlphaServer configurations, PSC engineers reduced the distance between processors, thereby also reducing cabling and minimizing network latency.
Total TCS floor space is roughly that of a basketball court. It uses 14 miles of high-bandwidth interconnect cable to maintain communication among its 3,000 processors. Another seven miles of serial copper cable and a mile of fiber-optic cable provide for data handling.
The TCS requires more than 650 kilowatts of power, enough to power 500 homes. It produces heat equivalent to burning 169 pounds of coal an hour, much of which is used in heating the Westinghouse Energy Center. To cool the computer room, more than 600 feet of eight-inch cooling pipe, weighing 12 tons, circulate up to 900 gallons of water per minute, and twelve 30-ton air-handling units provide cooling capacity equivalent to 375 room air conditioners.
For more information, visit the Web site, http://www.psc.edu/publicinfo/terascale/bigiron.html.
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center was established in 1986 and is supported by several federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and private industry.
MEDIA ADVISORYOct. 22, 2001
ATTENTION: Photo & Assignment Editors
WHAT: Ribbon-Cutting for the Terascale Computing SystemWHY: The most powerful open-research computing system in the world.
WHO: Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center -- a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh and Westinghouse Electric Co.
WHEN: Monday, Oct. 29, 10:00 a.m.WHERE: Westinghouse Energy Center4350 Northern PikeMonroeville, PA 15146
Leaders from industry, universities and government will celebrate installation of the Terascale Computing System, the most powerful system in the world committed to unclassified research. Developed by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in collaboration with Compaq Computer Corporation, with funding from the National Science Foundation, the TCS will support scientists and engineers nationwide in research that has wide social impact, such as storm-scale weather forecasting, global climate change, and modeling that leads to new drug therapies.
The program, with brief remarks on the significance of the TCS, will include:
Mike Doyle, United States Congress, (D, Pa-18).
James Roddey, chief executive, Allegheny County.
Mark A. Nordenberg, chancellor, University of Pittsburgh.
Jared L. Cohon, president, Carnegie Mellon University.
Charlie Pryor, president and chief executive officer, Westinghouse Electric Company.
Howard Elias, senior vice-president and general manager, Compaq Computer Corporation.
Richard Hirsh, acting division director, National Science Foundation.
A question-and-answer session and reception will follow. PSC staff will conduct tours of the computer room and demonstrate research.
Directions to Westinghouse Energy Center: http://www.psc.edu/training/Maps/directions.html#wec
Terascale Computing System: http://www.psc.edu/publicinfo/news/2001/terascale-10-01-01.html
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