Des Moines Register
06-29-06
Supercomputer list puts ISU machine in top 100
The IBM BlueGene/L, aka CyBlue, makes 5.7 trillion calculations per second.
By REID FORGRAVE
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
In the world of teraflops, Iowa ranks 99th.
That's according to a new list of the top 500 fastest supercomputer sites in the
world.
Iowa State University's new IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer, a big black
refrigerator-sized box housed in a secure area in the university's Durham Center,
has thrust the Hawkeye State - er, the Cyclone State? - into the top 100 for the
first time in a semiannual survey of the world's most powerful computing
systems.
Iowa State's supercomputer, named CyBlue, measured at 5.7 teraflops, meaning
the supercomputer can make 5.7 trillion calculations per second.
"This is basically the queen jewel that we have," said Srinivas Aluru, an Iowa
State professor of electrical and computer engineering who administers the
supercomputer. "These are really number-crunching machines. At the hand of
researchers who know how to use them, they are very useful."
But admit it, Cyclone fans: You'd be more excited if Iowa State garnered a
mention in the AP Top 25 preseason football poll.
Still, there's some decent street cred that goes with your university's new
supercomputer ranking as one of the world's fastest.
Only two Big 12 schools had higher-ranked supercomputers (University of Texas'
Lonestar2 ranked 65th, and University of Oklahoma's Topdawg ranked 88th).
CyBlue ranked one spot ahead of the supercomputer at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (100th).
Princeton University's Orangena supercomputer ranked 103rd, and our Midwest
neighbor, the University of Illinois, ranked 114th. According to Aluru, Iowa State's
supercomputer is in the top 20 among the nation's academic centers.
But, really: Who cares about Iowa's newfound computer- processing
prominence?
Patrick Schnable, for one, does.
Schnable, an Iowa State professor of plant genomics, is part of a
collaborative project to sequence the 50,000 genes in corn. Each gene is
associated with a specific trait - tolerance to drought, for example. When the
project builds a genomic road map, researchers will be able to genetically
manipulate corn to encourage certain traits.
The supercomputer "allows us to do this thousands of times faster than the
fastest desktop computer," Schnable said. "We can open up the side of this big
black box, and you see the guts of thousands of computers, all working together.
Imagine all the power you have on your desktop. What if you could tell 1,000
computers to do the same thing?"
CyBlue also is being used by dozens of researchers for projects in astrophysics,
atmospheric sciences, bioinformatics, chemical engineering, computational
chemistry, information assurance, nuclear physics and systems biology.
Luckily, CyBlue is still controlled by humans, unlike the malicious and
autonomous HAL-9000 computer from "2001: A Space Odyssey."
"It doesn't look like a lot, does it?" said Iowa State spokesman Jim Davis. "It
seems like it ought to have a lot of lights flashing or something. But it just does its
thing, really quietly."
About CyBlue
CyBlue is the name Iowa State University researchers gave the front end of the
IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer that arrived at ISU in January 2006, courtesy of
a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and another $650,000
from university sources.
CyBlue ranks as the 99th-fasted supercomputer in the world, according to the
latest TOP500 list released at the International Supercomputer Conference in
Dresden, Germany, on Wednesday.
Some numbers about this number-crunching behemoth:
• CyBlue makes 5.7 trillion calculations per second. IBM figures a person working
with a calculator would take 5 million years to make the same number of
calculations.
• The big black box, about the size of a refrigerator, contains 2,048 processors
and 11 trillion bytes of data storage.
• CyBlue, which is being used to help sequence the corn genome, also clustered
3.7 million mouse DNA sequences in less than 10 hours.
• In five months, the supercomputer only had one failure, and it was fixed in less
than a day.
• Iowa State's supercomputer is a good bit behind the world's fastest
supercomputer, which is installed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. That supercomputer reached
280.6 teraflops (280.6 trillion calculations per second), the only system ever to
exceed 100 teraflops.
• The last time Iowa State University made the list was in 1993, when its MasPar
MP-1216 ranked 490th.
More information about the world's top 500 supercomputing sites is at
top500.org.