SCD News: January 28, 2005
Once a leading-edge supercomputer, the IBM SP cluster reaches the end
of its lifecycle
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SCD's John Ellis (seated, second from left) flips the "off" switch at the base of a blackforest frame, starting shutdown of the IBM SP cluster. A team of SCD staff who have helped support the system and its users for the past 5-1/2 years assembles for the momentous occasion. Larger photo and caption |
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Going, going ... gone! |
A t 8 a.m. on 12 January 2004, John Ellis, a software engineer in NCAR's Scientific Computing Division (SCD), flipped an "off" switch on one frame of blackforest, the IBM SP cluster that had served NCAR researchers since 1999. Then, accompanied by SCD staff who had supported the system and its users for more than five years, he walked up and down two rows of tall black towers, methodically flipping switches one by one till the humming machine grew silent.
It was the end of the line for blackforest, a landmark high-performance system that more than doubled the raw compute power at NCAR when it was first installed. Its arrival heralded the transition to a new kind of computer architecture for NCAR: clustered, distributed-memory supercomputing.
A crowd turned out to see the blackforest dedication ceremony on 11 August 1999. Rick Anthes, president of UCAR, and Lou Bifano, vice president for IBM SP systems, offered congratulatory speeches. "The SP is part of the vanguard of new, robust supercomputing systems being produced by U.S. manufacturers," said SCD director Al Kellie, now the associate director of NCAR's Computational and Information Systems Laboratory. In an interview for the Fall 1999 UCAR Quarterly, he noted, "What we are doing is increasing capacity not only to meet our immediate needs, but to set the stage for more efficient science."
In fact, blackforest took over much of the computing that formerly had been done by antero, the CRAY C90. Over the course of its lifetime, blackforest provided scientists with a platform to study global climate change, droughts, long-range weather prediction, atmospheric chemistry, and space weather.
In its initial $6.2 million configuration, blackforest had 148 Winterhawk I nodes, each with two processors, and a peak speed of 237 gigaflops. In May 2000, its 148 Winterhawk I nodes were replaced with 151 Winterhawk II nodes, bringing the system's peak speed to 906 gigaflops.
The following year, in October 2001, the system more than doubled in size, with the addition of 164 Winterhawk II nodes and three Nighthawk II nodes for a total of 318 nodes. This expansion, part of a the Phase I rollout of a new Advanced Research Computing System (ARCS) that would later include another IBM cluster, gave blackforest a peak speed of 1.962 teraflops — again more than doubling the computational power available to NCAR researchers.
In total, blackforest spent 14% of its life as a Winterhawk I system, 27% of its life as a Winterhawk II system, and 59% of its life in its final configuration as Phase I of ARCS.
"The introduction of blackforest in 1999, and subsequent upgrades in 2000 and 2001, returned NCAR to prominence among the top 20 supercomputer centers around the world according to the Top500 list of supercomputing sites," says SCD deputy director Tom Bettge. "During the past five years, it has truly been a workhorse for NCAR and university science."
But, he adds, the leading edge of computer technology moves rapidly forward, and this year's supercomputer is the previous generation within two years. Blackforest was no exception. Due to ongoing maintenance and power costs, as well as the ratio of price/performance compared to systems like the new 256-processor Linux cluster named lightning, blackforest had outlived its practical usefulness.
SCD is now making plans and preparing the NCAR Computing Room for procurement of the next system to keep the NCAR community at the forefront of high-end computer technology.
In the meantime, lightning will become a production compute platform in February 2005. SCD expects lightning will handle about 60% of blackforest's capacity.
SCD encourages blackforest users to migrate to bluesky, the IBM Cluster 1600.
— Lynda Lester, Tom Bettge, Tom Engel
NCAR is operated by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) under the primary sponsorship of the National Science Foundation.
Photos: Lynda Lester, NCAR/SCD
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NCAR is managed
by UCAR and sponsored by the National Science Foundation |
