NSF awards $12 million to SDSC to deploy 'Comet' supercomputer

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the
University of California, San Diego, has been awarded a
$12-million grant from the National Science
Foundation (NSF) to deploy Comet , a new petascale
supercomputer designed to transform advanced
scientific computing by expanding access and capacity
among traditional as well as non-traditional research
domains. Comet will be capable of an overall peak
performance of nearly two petaflops, or two
quadrillion operations per second.
"Supercomputers such as Comet and our data-
intensive Gordon system are helping to fulfill the
NSF's goal to extend the impact of advanced
computational resources to a larger and more
diversified user base," said UC San Diego Chancellor
Pradeep K. Khosla. "Our San Diego Supercomputer
Center is a key resource for our university system and
has had a long track-record of leadership in high-
performance computers and data-intensive
computing."
While science domains such as physics, astronomy,
and the earth sciences have long relied on at-scale
high-performance computing (HPC) to help them
create detailed simulations to accelerate discovery,
there is a growing need for computing capacity for a
broader set of researchers, including those in non-
traditional domains such as genomics, the social
sciences, and economics.
Computing for the 99 Percent
"Comet is designed to be part of an emerging
cyberinfrastructure for what is called the 'long tail' of
science, which encompasses the idea that a large
number of modest-sized computationally based
research projects still represents, in aggregate, a
tremendous amount of research and scientific
impact," said Sandra A. Brown, Vice Chancellor for
Research at UC San Diego.
"Comet is all about computing for the 99 percent,"
said SDSC Director Michael Norman, the project's
principal investigator. "As the world's first virtualized
HPC cluster, it is designed to deliver a significantly
increased level of computing capacity and
customizability to support data-enabled science and
engineering at the campus, regional, and national
levels, and in turn support the entire science and
engineering enterprise, including education as well as
research."
Comet will join SDSC's Gordon supercomputer as a
key resource within NSF's Extreme Science and
Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) ,
which comprises the most advanced collection of
integrated digital resources and services in the world.
It is expected that Comet will help meet the pent-up
demand for computing on up to 1,024 cores, which
accounts for 98% of current jobs among XSEDE users.
While Comet will be able to support much larger jobs,
its scheduling policies will be designed to provide fast
turnaround for large numbers of smaller jobs.
Comet will also be the first XSEDE production system
to support high-performance virtualization. SDSC team
members plan to work closely with communities and
enable them to develop the customized software
stacks that meet their needs by defining virtual
clusters. With significant advances in Single Root IO
Virtualization (SRIOV), virtual clusters will be able to
attain near native hardware performance in both
InfiniBand latency and bandwidth, making them
suitable for MPI-style parallel computing.
"We are supporting Comet to provide a resource not
just for the highest end-users, but for scientists and
engineers across a broad spectrum of disciplines," said
Barry Schneider, program director for Comet in NSF's
Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. "This so-
called long tail of science is discovering the power of
advanced digital resources. In this way, Comet
complements other NSF resources such as Blue
Waters and Stampede, which were designed
primarily to provide power users with the ability to
perform large-scale computations."
Petascale Power
Scheduled to start operations in early 2015, Comet
will be a Dell-based cluster based on next-generation
Intel Xeon processors. Each node will be equipped with
two of those processors, 128 GB (gigabytes) of
traditional DRAM, and 320 GB of flash memory. Since
Comet is designed to optimize capacity for modest-
scale jobs, each rack of 72 nodes will have a full
bisection InfiniBand FDR interconnect, with a 4:1
bisection interconnect across the racks.
"Dell was ecstatic to partner with SDSC on this
particular National Science Foundation proposal," said
Tim Carroll, Executive Director of Dell Research
Computing Solutions. "UC San Diego has a rich history
of providing breakthrough technology to the broadest
base of researchers possible. At Dell we are committed
to the very same mission, so the collaboration was
intuitive. We are proud to deliver this solution to the
research community and to be part of the next
generation of breakthroughs."
"When you look inside Comet , the key enabling
computing capability will be the Intel Xeon
processors," said Mark Seager, Chief Technology
Officer for the High Performance Computing
Ecosystem at Intel. "These new processors will deliver
significant performance improvements to the NSF's
general-purpose scientific workload, or the 99 percent,
with a robust set of virtualization features that enable a
broad spectrum of high-performance applications in a
large memory, virtualized environment."
In addition, Comet will include some large-memory
nodes, each with 1.5 TB of memory, as well as nodes
with NVIDIA GPUs (graphic processing units). The GPU
and large-memory nodes will target specific
applications, such as visualization, molecular dynamics
simulations or de novo genome assembly.
Comet users will also have access to 7 PB (petabytes)
of Lustre-based high-performance storage, as well as 6
PB of durable storage for data reliability, both based
on an evolution of SDSC's Data Oasis storage system.
UC San Diego and SDSC are also deploying new 100
Gbps (Gigabit per second) connectivity, allowing users
to rapidly move data to SDSC for analysis and data
sharing, and return data to their institutions for local
use.
Comet will be the successor to SDSC's Trestles
computer cluster, to be retired in 2014 after four
years of service.
"Comet will have all of the features that made
Trestles so popular with users, but with much more
capacity and ease-of-access," said SDSC Deputy
Director Richard Moore, a co-PI of the Comet project.
"Comet will be particularly well-suited to science
gateways that serve large communities of users,
especially those new to XSEDE."
Norman and Moore are joined by three co-principal
investigators from SDSC on the Comet project: SDSC
Associate Director and XSEDE co-PI Nancy Wilkins-
Diehr; SDSC Distinguished Scientist Chaitan Baru; and
SDSC Chief Technical Officer Philip Papadopoulos.
Geoffrey Fox, Distinguished Professor of Computer
Science and Informatics at Indiana University and PI
of the NSF's FutureGrid project , is a strategic
partner for the project.
The Comet project is funded under NSF grant number
ACI 1341698.
Provided by University of California - San Diego

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