The road to exascale computing is a long one, but pioneers like those at the Georgia Institute of Technology, continue to drive technology innovation. From algorithms to architectures and applications, Georgia Tech's researchers are collaborating with top companies, national labs and defense organizations to solve the complex challenges of tomorrow's supercomputing systems. Ongoing projects and new research initiatives spanning several Georgia Tech disciplines directly addressing core HPC issues such as sustainability, reliability and massive data computation will be on display November 13-19, 2010 at SC10 in New Orleans, Lousiana.
Led by Jeffrey Vetter, joint professor of computational science and engineering at Georgia Tech and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, "Keeneland" is an NSF-funded project to deploy a high-performance heterogeneous computing system consisting of HP servers integrated with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. Entering its second-year, the project will deploy its initial delivery system — the first of two experimental systems — this month. During the initial performance runs, the Keeneland system was clocked at running 64 teraflops per second, placing it well within the top 100 systems in the world on the most recent TOP500 list of supercomputers. Given the system's excellent energy efficiency of approximately 650 megaflops per second per watt on the TOP500 Linpack, the team is hoping to secure a strong position on the Green500 list of the most energy efficient supercomputers in the world.
Keeneland is supported by a $12 million grant from NSF's Track 2D program, a five-year activity designed to fund the deployment and operation of two innovative computing systems, with an overarching goal of preparing the open computational science community for emerging architectures that have high performance and are energy efficient
"Heterogeneous computing will play an important role in the future of high performance computing due to the new challenges of extreme parallelism and energy efficiency," said Vetter. "The Keeneland partnership is providing hardware and software resources, training, and expertise to the computational science community at a critical time in this transition to new computing architectures."
