Parallel Supercomputer Available to NIH Scientists in the Summer

A 56-processor IBM Scalable PowerParallel (SP) system is currently being tested by a group of DCRT pilot users. It will be available later this summer for general use by NIH scientists who have very high computational requirements. The NIH SP is jointly funded by DCRT's Computing Facilities Branch (CFB) and the Computational Biological and Engineering Lab (CBEL).

The NIH SP, whose network name is "Spica," becomes the third large-scale computer supported by the High Performance Scientific Computing Section of CFB. The others are Helix, a 6-processor SGI Challenge, and Coil, a 3-processor Convex C3830. The SP's scalable architecture distinguishes it from the other two computers. It is built from building blocks called nodes, each of which consists of a 66 MHz POWER2 microprocessor with associated memory and disk storage.

Connecting all of the nodes is a high-performance, low-latency switch network providing 40 megabytes/second bandwidth between any two nodes. Programs can achieve high performance by running on many processors simultaneously—that is "in parallel"—and communicating via the switch. Each node has a peak floating-point speed of 265 MFLOPS, for a peak of over 14 GFLOPS for the 56-node SP.

A different programming model is used on the SP computer to achieve optimum performance. Because of the distributed nature of the processors and memory, communication among the parts of a parallel program executing on different nodes must be explicitly programmed by "message passing" using the standard programming interface library MPI (message passing interface). MPI may be used with either the C or FORTRAN programming languages.

Use of the SP will be limited to problems that can benefit from being parallelized. CBEL will work with NIH scientists to develop their computationally intensive applications for this new parallel system.

Announcements on the availability of the NIH SP will be made on the Helix home page

http://helix.nih.gov

For more information, see the "NIH SP User Information" site at

http:// helix.nih.gov/documents/sp-guide.html

Interface 196 (June 15, 1996)