Big news from Camp Green this week—Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced a new supercomputer that will contain up to 18,000 NVIDIA GPUs. The supercomputer currently known as Jaguar will be affectionately re-dubbed “Titan” and will have a peak performance topping out around 20 petaflops. With all that GPU power under its belt, Titan is twice as fast and three times more energy efficient than Japan’s K computer, the current record holder.
Jaguar. Rawr.
Steve Scott, NVIDIA Tesla CTO, had this to say about the announcement and supercomputing in general:
Today’s scientists and policy-makers are grappling with huge societal problems: energy dependence, climate change, disease and national security, to name just a few. High performance computing has a critical role to play in meeting these challenges, as well as advancing just about every area of science.
For several hundred years, the traditional methods of scientific advancement were theory and experiment, but simulation has emerged as the third pillar of science. In many areas of science and engineering, simulation can provide insights and understanding that simply cannot be gleaned from experiment.
For some problems, a little more computing leads to a little better result, shortening the time to insight. But there are other problems where additional computing power can lead to truly transformational results.
The U.S. Department of Energy says there are a number of computing challenges that require exascale-class computing, including:
- Combustion: Exascale systems will enable the development of new combustion engines that are 20-50 percent more fuel efficient. This has the potential to dramatically improve industrial competitiveness, while decreasing our dependence on foreign oil.
- Aerospace: Exascale will enable complete, first-principals simulation of jet engine combustion, allowing us to solve the problem of hot fluid migration into the turbine, providing a major advancement in efficiency.
- Biology: Exascale will enable a comprehensive simulation of an entire cell at the molecular, chemical, genetic and biological levels, accurately representing processes such as cell growth, metabolism, locomotion and sensing – leading to the potential to cure some of our most pernicious diseases.
- Fusion: Exascale is necessary to accurately model future Fusion reactors, which offer the promise of abundant, safe, non-polluting energy.
These are just a few examples, but it’s clear that exascale computing will provide tremendous benefits to society, advancing scientific discovery, informing policy makers, and improving industrial and economic competitiveness.
There is, however, a big problem in getting to exascale computing: power. An exascale computer using today’s x86 technology would require two gigawatts of power, equivalent to the maximum output of the Hoover Dam! Our technology needs to be about 100 times more energy efficient in order to build practical exascale systems.
That’s where GPUs come in. Unlike traditional CPUs, which are designed to make serial tasks run as quickly as possible, GPUs are designed to run many parallel tasks as power-efficiently as possible. The result is that a GPU takes several times less power than a CPU per operation.
It’s clear that as technology continues to improve, it will be further called upon to help in decision making and planning for years to come. Exascale computing with GPUs refocuses the supercomputer to work smarter, not faster. The goal today is to be more efficient and get more per core while using less power. Being able to relate this new-found power to the general population is important, as well, to ensure that the government continues to support growth and development in this sector. Many were captivated by Watson’s stint on Jeopardy! this past year. Viewers of the program were shown that, above all else, computers are able to provide a quick-thinking encyclopedia of information. While the use was quite different than that of a supercomputer, it provided a perfect example of what computing data means today in a way even your mother can understand.
(ed.note: That’s right Trebek, I shaid your mother)
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