Public invited to supercomputer commissioning

August 6, 2012

will host the official commissioning of Alaska’s most capable supercomputer, known as Fish, Thursday Aug. 9 from 4 - 5 p.m. in the Board of Regents' Conference room located in the Butrovich Building on the �� campus. The public is invited to the ceremony; Tours of the data center will be offered from 3 - 3:50 p.m.

This Cray XK6m supercomputer is named for Alaska’s fisheries and ocean and water resources. ARSC was one of the first organizations to purchase Cray’s newest model, which uses graphics processing units—like those used by gaming computers—to make scientific calculations run even faster. ARSC has operated Cray supercomputers continuously since 1993.

ARSC director Greg Newby said Fish will be a valuable tool for researchers working to understand and predict changes in arctic systems, including weather and climate, oceans and ice, permafrost and other materials.

“Supercomputers are used for science and engineering problems that require a lot of number crunching and very large storage,” Newby said. “By coordinating the efforts of hundreds of CPUs, a supercomputer can do in a day what a normal computer would take years to do.”

The Cray XK6m system was delivered with 1152 AMD Opteron CPU cores and 48 NVIDIA Tesla GPU processors. The total theoretical peak system performance is calculated to be 41.75 Teraflops. Fish joins Pacman, a supercomputer with a theoretical peak system performance of over 31 Teraflops. Both are available to any UA affiliate and to the State of Alaska.

Simultaneously with deploying Fish, ARSC is making available a new 400TB center-wide Lustre file system and expanding its hierarchical file system. These storage resources allow scientists to process massive datasets and store results. Thanks to a new data portal initiative, ARSC users can also provide data to the public via the Web.

Fish’s purchase was funded primarily through National Science Foundation grants, including PACMAN, the Pacific Area Climate Monitoring and Analysis Network and the Major Research Instrumentation program.

Contact: Liam Forbes, ARSC HPC systems analyst, 907-450-8618, loforbes@alaska.edu. Greg Newby, ARSC director, 907-450-8663, gbnewby@alaska.edu for more information.

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