Supercomputing systems advances

The Supercomputer Systems Group supports high-performance computing at NCAR. At year end, this group consisted of five people who install, administer, maintain, and enhance vendor-supplied operating system software and products sets. These systems are supplied by three major U.S. manufacturers of supercomputer equipment: Hewlett-Packard, Inc. (HP), Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), and Cray Research (Cray), a subsidiary of SGI. Each of these vendors has their own unique version of a UNIX operating system, compilers, libraries, user productivity tools, batch subsystems and administrative support tools. This group assists vendor engineers with the isolation, diagnosis and resolution of hardware and software problems. Additionally, SSG develops software systems to handle the special needs that arise that are beyond the functionality provided by the vendor's product set. These include enhancements in the areas of job scheduling, system performance and behavior monitoring and tuning, and special peripheral connections to other storage and networking equipment. The Batch Priority Scheduler, described in the Unified Queuing System section, is one of these locally-developed products.

This table lists the supercomputers managed by the Supercomputer Systems Group at the end of FY97 and provides system configuration and actual measured average performance and utilization data on these systems and their workload during FY97. With the change of equipment during FY97, the total computing power available to the CSL and Community users on NCAR's floor doubled during the year: from approximately 5 GFLOPS at the end of FY96 to approximately 10 GFLOPS at the end of FY97.

Average supercomputer system performance and utilization during FY97
System	Configuration (CPUs, memory, OS)	Average GFLOPS	Average user utilization
Climate Simulation Laboratory computers
C90/16-256 (antero)	16 CPUs, 256 Mwords, UNICOS 9.2	4.269	86.3%
T3D-256	256 PEs, 1024 Mwords, UNICOS MAX 1.3	1.25 (est.)	69.1%
J932/20-512 (aztec)	20 CPUs, 512 Mwords, UNICOS 9.2	1.163	92.4%

Community computers
J9se32/24-1024 (ouray)	24 CPUs, 1024 Mwords, UNICOS 9.2	1.533	88.8%
J916/16-256 (paiute)	16 CPUs, 256 Mwords, UNICOS 9.2	0.789	80.4%

DataPark system
SGI Power Challenge XL10000 (winterpark)	8 CPUs, 1024 Mbytes, Irix 6.2	0.60 (est.)	29.0%

High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC)
HP SPP-2000 (sioux)	64 CPUs, 8192 Mbytes, SPP-UX 5.2.1	2.5 (est.)	20.5%

Additional accomplishments

Additional noteworthy accomplishments of the Supercomputer Systems Group during FY97 include:

Machine installations: SSG installed and upgraded four systems during FY97. In the Climate Simulation Laboratory, the Cray C90 (antero) replaced the previous "antero" machine (a Y-MP/8I), and the T3D was upgraded from 64 PEs to 128 PEs. The Community systems had the Cray J90se (ouray) installed in the spring. In addition, the Supercomputer Systems Group handled the installation and configuration of the HP SPP-2000 (sioux) in late summer.
Major operating system upgrades were done on all Crays and the HP SPP-2000.
The Unified Queuing System was implemented on all Crays, winterpark, and the SPP-2000.
SSG participated in helping make the winterpark system a production system for CGD and university users.

SSG continues to provide system support for the NCAR compute servers on a 24-hour, on-call basis.

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