Category: Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

An IIT student team placed fourth in an annual 48-hour competition that challenges young computer scientists to tune and run a series of high-performance computing codes, non-stop, on a small cluster they build from their own design. The team of 5 computer science undergrads and one junior from Naperville Central High School competed with 8 other teams from around the world at the Student Cluster Competition at SC’15 in Austin, TX.
This year’s 5-node cluster design was built using Intel components. William Scullin and Ben Allen, both HPC systems administrators at ALCF, and Ioan Raicu, assistant professor of computer science at IIT and a guest researcher in Argonne’s MCS Division, worked closely with the team as coaches and mentors. Argonne and Intel provided technical and financial support. To read more about the competition, click here.

Today at ALCF, a powerful new cluster with terabytes of RAM and GPU memory stands ready to meet our user community’s data analysis needs. Cooley, the follow-on system to Tukey, will support more exploration capabilities, including in-situ analysis and unprecedented volume-rendered visualization. Cooley shares the same software environment, network, and file systems as ALCF’s supercomputer, Mira, enabling direct access to Mira-generated results.
An article about the new system and links to Cooley user documentation can be found here.

After much anticipation, the Department of Energy recently announced that industry partners Intel and Cray would be delivering Argonne’s next supercomputer, Aurora. The new system will be a first-of-its-kind product from the market-leading chipmaker and the renowned computer manufacturer, and is expected to be at least 18 times more powerful than the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility’s current system, Mira.

Mira has lots of science to accomplish between now and the time Aurora arrives on the scene in 2018, but the planning phase officially kicked off this week with a call for proposals for Aurora’s pre-production system, Theta.

The Early Science program for Theta is accepting proposals through May 22. Selected projects will get early access to the machine and support from ALCF staff and postdocs. Look for Aurora’s Early Science Program call for proposals next spring.

Mira’s testing and development system, a Blue Gene/Q called Cetus, has grown to 4 racks to allow users to debug their project code at an even larger scale before moving to Mira.
This upgrade will support new types of HPC workloads. Smaller jobs (128-2048 nodes) will now be allowed to run for up to 12 hours. Longer running jobs (128-1024 nodes) will be allowed to run for up to 7 days, which is suitable for analysis activities since Cetus and Mira share the same file system.

University of Southern California doctoral student Ying Li will join ALCF this fall as the 2014 Margaret Butler Postdoctoral Fellow. Li is the first recipient of the ALCF fellowship that was announced during the spring 2013 Celebration of Thirty Years of Parallel Computing at Argonne, to commemorate a pioneering woman and scientist who programmed the first digital computers at Argonne in the 1950s, helped design subsequent ones, and contributed to simulations of nuclear power reactors.
Li, who graduates this summer with a doctorate in materials science and a master’s degree in computer science, belongs to the new generation of computational scientists. As a member of prominent computational materials science research team led by USC professor Priya Vashishta, Li has already worked on massively parallel computers, including Argonne’s Mira, in several investigations involving reactive force-field molecular dynamics simulations of upwards of one million atoms. To learn more about Ying Li, see ALCF’s recent feature.

On April 22 and May 15, the INCITE program will host short webinars for anyone who’s interested in applying for 2015 INCITE time on Titan, the 27-petaflops Cray XK7 at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, or on Mira, the 10-petaflops IBM Blue Gene/Q at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.
The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, now in its tenth year, provides huge core-hour allocations on these two DOE production systems, at no cost to the researcher, to pursue breakthroughs in science and engineering.
During the sessions, INCITE Program Manager Julia White and LCF center representatives will provide tips for submitting a successful INCITE proposal, help you gauge your project’s readiness, describe the review process, and answer your questions. Registration is open.
INCITE 2015 call for proposals opens April 16 and closes June 27, 2014.