Communications of the ACM
Edison Electrifies Scientific Computing
The Cray XC30 at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was named in honor of American inventor Thomas Alva Edison.
Credit: NERSC
The U.S. National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center, a division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, recently accepted Edison, a new flagship supercomputer designed for scientific productivity. "We support a very broad range of science, from basic energy research to climate science, from biosciences to discovering new materials, exploring high energy physics and even uncovering the very origins of the universe," says NERSC director Sudip Dosanjh.
Edison can execute nearly 2.4 quadrillion floating-point operations per second at peak theoretical speeds. However, Dosanjh says what is really important is the scientific productivity of the users, which is why Edison was configured to handle data analysis and simulation and modeling, equally well. He notes that both types of computing rely heavily on moving data. "So Edison has been optimized for that: it has a really high-speed interconnect, it has lots of memory bandwidth, lots of memory per node, and it has very high input/output speeds to the file system and disk system," Dosanjh says.
Since Edison does not utilize accelerators, researchers have been able to move their codes from NERSC's old system to Edison with little or no changes.
From National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
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Abstracts Copyright © 2014 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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