Local researchers flex Blue Gene muscle

Computer scientists from local research organizations have a rare opportunity to run their applications on part of the world's most powerful supercomputer, Blue Gene, as it enters Australia on a world tour.

During September and October, researchers from CSIRO, the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC), and Sydney University will test their high-performance computing (HPC) applications on Blue Gene, which began life as an IBM research project but is now available commercially.

Albert Zomaya, Sydney University's Professor of Internetworking, said that over the last few years there has been a lot of interest in ultra-HPC because of bioinformatics, which is now bigger than computational biology.

"For the past three years we have been working on a range of problems in the field of phylogenetics, which traces the evolution of proteins," Zomaya said, adding that this problem will be thrown at the travelling Blue Gene, a single rack machine in IBM's Melbourne data centre. Such proteins are related to auto-immune diseases like HIV and different types of cancers and to study them effectively, "the data explodes".

Zomaya, a 16-year veteran of high-performance computing, has access to supercomputers at the Australian Centre for Advanced Computing and Communications and the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing, but only a 30-CPU blade cluster in his own computer science department.

"We have access [with Blue Gene] to all the processors to see how it scales," he said. "Blue Gene goes beyond a single application [and] is so versatile it could serve a wide range of applications."

Zomaya said the code needs some re-engineering to sit comfortably on Blue Gene and early results "show promise" with most of it already done.

Adalio Sanchez, IBM's worldwide pSeries general manager, said the company's investment in Power technology has allowed it to drive growth in the Unix market and climb up the ranks of the Top500 supercomputer list.

"Look at the Top500 and IBM has six [machines] out of the top 10; 10 of the top 20; 52 percent of the Top500, and 57 percent of the total compute power in the Top500," Sanchez said, adding that Blue Gene machines occupy the first, second, and sixth-places.

Sanchez said IBM has been able to achieve such scalability because of the tight systems integration.

"The game has changed and being a manufacturer of only one part of the stack is not enough," he said.

IBM Australia deep computing business executive, Andrew Brockfield, said the first system to be installed commercially, for the US Department of Energy, dubbed Blue Gene/L now has 32 racks in operation, with the remaining 32 racks scheduled for installation later this year. With a peak performance of 183 teraflops, Blue Gene/L is well on top of the commodity supercomputers.

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