Objective

To evaluate the new HP Exemplar hardware and software in support of expanding the number of applications in the Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) arena.

Approach

JPL has added a new state-of-the-art supercomputer to the supercomputing resources available for Lab Earth and space science projects. JPL and Caltech share this new HP X-Class Exemplar, which is in the Booth Building on the Caltech campus. The HP Exemplar joins the CRAY J90 supercomputer now in use by the JPL Supercomputing Project. This system was procured under a collaborative agreement between Caltech/JPL and HP. NASA sponsors for this system are the Office of Space Science and the ESS Project under NASA's HPCC Program. The National Science Foundation also provided substantial funding for the system through Caltech's participation in the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI).

Accomplishments

The installed hardware consists of 16 Hypernodes, where each has:

Eight of the Hypernodes also have an ATM interface.

The basic element of the Exemplar system is the 64-bit HP PA-8000 processor. Sixteen processors are grouped into one Hypernode and share a single pool of four GB's of memory. The 16 Hypernodes in the Caltech/JPL system are interconnected through a 2-D communications network called a Coherent Toroidal Interconnect (CTI) ring. The Exemplar runs on SPP-UX, the Unix-based operating system originally developed by Convex Corporation. SPP-UX has all the features normally associated with Unix plus features providing additional utility, such as batch processing, accounting, and support for shared memory and the CTI ring. Current software included Fortran 77, Fortran 90, HPF, C, and C++ compilers, as well as math and communication libraries, debugging tools, and performance analysis and monitoring tools.

Significance

Caltech/JPL will provide feedback to HP's High Performance Computing Division from its experiences using the Exemplar to enhance its hardware/software, thus contributing to maintaining U.S. leadership in supercomputing. The applications running on the Exemplar will help address the Grand Challenges of the Earth and space sciences in the analysis of the enormous datasets from NASA's Earth and planetary missions.

Status/Plans

Currently, there are 239 NASA users in 78 projects. The system supports both shared-memory programs and message-passing programs for up to 256 processors. Efforts in collaboration with HP include.

• Improving the scheduling of batch jobs so as to eliminate oversubscription.
• Improving the debugger so that it can handle shared-memory programs.
• Working with HP's MPI group on the continuing implementation and improvement of MPI-2.
• Implementing the transition from SPP-UX to HP-UX.
  

Point of Contact

Larry Eversole
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Larry.C.Eversole@jpl.nasa.gov
818-354-2786