NASA to Replace 'Columbia' Itanium-InfiniBand Cluster

Published: June 21, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, has been a very big and steady customer for supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics, and has been the place where SGI could count on getting big boxes into the field and tested on complex workloads. NASA Ames is the home of the "Columbia" cluster, which is based on a cluster of Altix Linux servers glued together with InfiniBand switches and which is ranked the eighth most powerful supercomputer in the world at the moment. But, IBM has got its foot in the door and has won a deal that will allow it to take part in the bidding to replace Columbia.

The Columbia cluster was acquired by NASA Ames in the summer of 2004, and currently consists of 10,160 Itanium 2 chips running at 1.5 GHz. The cluster has a rating of 51.9 sustained teraflops on the Linpack Fortran benchmark test (nearly 61 teraflops peak), and could be easily upgraded to dual-core "Montecito" Itanium 9000 chips delivering more than twice the oomph. SGI is working on new blade architecture designs, and is counting on Intel's "Tukwila" Itanium chips, due next year, to offer its customers even more computing power.

NASA Ames seems to have come to the conclusion that it is always a good idea to have two vendors to grind against each other, and has given a contract to IBM for a small evaluation system that will allow NASA to put the System p5 architecture through the paces against the Itanium-InfiniBand combo. This relatively small cluster that IBM has been commission to build is comprised of System p5 575+ servers with a total of 640 processors and delivering 5.6 teraflops of peak performance, which will sit beside Columbia and augment its current processing capacity.

As part of its upgrading of supercomputing capacity, NASA plans to do a four-phase deployment to move to a machine that is much more powerful than Columbia. The IBM System p5 575+ cluster is part of the initial bidding process and IBM has not, unlike what the press release seems to suggest, been awarded the deal. (This box is not phase one of the deployment.) SGI is demonstrating benchmarks running on gear, too, according to sources at NASA. And who knows who else will try to chase the deal. Cray is an obvious potential bidder, as is Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.

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