One giant step for cosmic physics in Ireland

IBM's new supercomputer will place Ireland on to the supercomputer Top 500 list and near the top of the new Green 500 list, writes Karlin Lillington.

Irish researchers' long-awaited multimillion-dollar baby - an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer ordered from the US, which was delivered in December and has been operational for the past few weeks - has scientists queuing up to run complex programs that until now required a trip abroad.

The supercomputer - about the size of a large wardrobe - is now the most powerful machine in the country. In comparison to a typical desktop PC with one or two processors (the microchips that form the brain of a computer), the Irish Blue Gene supercomputer has 6, 144 processors.

It will be used to crunch through data at high speed for projects that will help researchers better understand phenomena ranging from the creation and behaviour of planets, stars and galaxies to the formation of global weather patterns to the oddities of quantum computing.

"This is significant step for Irish research capability," says Prof Luke Drury of the school of cosmic physics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. "It is a strategic investment to support a broad range of research."

Massive supercomputing power is especially useful for testing models of how things work, whether that be the possible shapes of the universe or the orbit patterns of distant planets, the best design for an aircraft wing, the effect a new drug on a tumour or the impact a catastrophic natural disaster such as a tsunami, flood or earthquake could have.

The computer can be fed a wide range of variables that will enable researchers to see how small changes might affect a large complex system. For example, supercomputers have been used to model the impact over time of global warming, enabling scientists to better understand the large scale effects of many small-scale events such as fractional increases in temperature or changes in the environment.

The first researchers to get access to Blue Gene - a Maynooth team hoping to simulate aspects of a quantum computer - began running their programs in January. They will test theories of how a quantum computer might operate under the quirky laws of physics at the scale of the very small and theoretically would be tiny, but have computing capability surpassing that of today's most powerful supercomputers.

The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies was set up by Éamon de Valera in 1940 with schools of cosmic physics, theoretical physics and Celtic studies.

The institute signed the contract and manages the computer, but the installation also was supported by funding from the Higher Education Authority under the programme for research in third-level institutions. It also has commitments from all seven universities here, the Royal College of Surgeons, Dublin Institute of Technology and the Tyndall National Institute. HEAnet hosts it under high security at its national hosting centre in Blanchardstown, and it is operated by the Irish Centre for High End Computing.

Prof Drury says the supercomputer is "not for everyone" - not just because it is a fairly exclusive machine, but because its architecture and the way it is designed to run programs suit specific types of "massively parallel" processes.

"It is specialised for tightly coupled programs - where you need to get information from one processor over to another very, very quickly - and where you need to run thousands of processes and have a very large amount of data," says Prof Drury.

There are other massively parallel computing resources available to researchers, such as grids - interlinked networks of many smaller individual computers, usually desktop PCs, often in disparate geographical locations. However the distance between the processors makes them a clumsier tool for some types of problems.

According to Bill Kearney, director of IBM's Dublin Software Lab, the supercomputer is partly built from Blue Gene/P, the latest version of this model of supercomputer, and partly of Blue Gene/L, the last model. Ireland is one of the first worldwide installations of Blue Gene/P.

The entire computer can run about 20 trillion calculations a second. "That's a lot of computing power," Kearney says. "Certain types of modelling that might have taken weeks before, can now be done in hours."

The new computer will place Ireland into the list of the annually calculated supercomputer Top 500 list and it will likely place among the very top of the list of the new Green 500 list, which calculates the most environmentally friendly, energy-efficient supercomputers.

Kearney says energy efficiency is one of the key features. Supercomputers are generally energy hogs because of the heat emitted and often need inbuilt cooling systems as well as external air-conditioning system.

Part of the institute's arrangement with IBM will allow IBM computational scientists access to the computer; IBM will also provide support not just in maintaining the computer but in helping Irish researchers design programs that will best work with their goals and their data.

The supercomputer so far remains nameless but, following tradition, it will likely be given the name of an eminent scientist from Ireland's past.