ECMWF Supercomputer History....

[Radeonator]

Pada pengen tahu apa bentuk supercomputer yang dipake buat hitung ramalan cuaca dari jaman dahulu sampe sekarang? kebetulan ternyata ECMWF berbaik hati memberi rinciannya kepada kita... dan memang kayaknya buat sekedar pengetahuan, wa kasih beberapa rinciannya kepada kalian...

apa itu ECMWF? wa kasih sedikit background dari om wiki:
European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is an international organisation based at Reading, England that was founded in 1975.

The objectives of the ECMWF are:

* Development of numerical methods for medium-range weather forecasting
* Preparation of medium-range weather forecasts for distribution to the member states
* Scientific and technical research directed to the improvement of these forecasts
* Collection and storage of appropriate meteorological data.

The ECMWF has been producing operational medium-range weather forecasts since 1979-08-01.

It has run two "re-analysis" projects, the first ECMWF re-analysis (ERA-15) project generated reanalyses from December 1978 to February 1994. The ERA-40 project generated reanalyses from 1957.

The history of ECMWF is recorded in the book: "Medium-Range Weather Prediction - the European Approach" by Austin Woods, published Springer 2005.

The ECMWF members are of 18 European states: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Republic of Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom

The ECMWF has co-operation agreements with other states: Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Iceland, Lithuania, Hungary, Morocco, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia.

let's get to the point... wa kasih sedikit background (kali ini sistemnya) deh..


ECMWF Supercomputer History

In order to run weather forecast models within a schedule that has reasonably short timeslots, powerful supercomputer systems are required..

The first version of the ECMWF weather forecasting model was developed on a Control Data Corporation 6600 computer from 1976 to 1978. Although the CDC6600 was one of the most powerful systems available at the time, the forecast model still needed 12 days to produce a 10-day forecast. However, this showed that provided a suitably powerful computer could be acquired, useful forecasts could be produced

In June 1977, before the opening of the permanent headquarters at Shinfield Park in Reading, ECMWF contracted for delivery of its own supercomputer, a CRAY-1A, manufactured by Cray Research which was installed in at ECMWF's headquarters in Shinfield, Reading in late 1978. Before then, the Centre's scientists had access to "Serial 1", the first production model of the CRAY 1 series in order to test out all the programs required to produce a real operational forecast.

post wa taruh di beberapa post, tolong jangan post dulu please...

[Radeonator]

ECMWF delivered its first operational medium-range weather forecast to its Member States on 1 August 1979. It was produced using the CRAY-1A. This used about 5 hours of CPU time to produce a 10 day forecast, which was more than 50 times faster then the CDC6600, thereby making the production of 10-day forecasts a feasible undertaking.

The CRAY 1-A was a single processor computer with a memory of 8 Mbytes and a disk subsytem totalling 2.4 Gbytes. With a clock cycle time of 12.5 nanoseconds (equivalent to 80 MHz) and the ability to produce two results per cycle, the system had a theoretical peak performance of 160 Megaflops. Running the operational weather model, the machine was capable of a sustained performance of 50 Megaflops (50 million arithmetic calculations per second).


In 1984, the Cray-1A was replaced by a dual processor Cray XMP-22. This had two CPUs and 16 Mbytes of memory. ECMWF used this system to pioneer the operational use of multitasking, i.e. a programming paradigm that makes use of more than one CPU by a single program. The XMP system also incorporated a number of additonal improvements - an IOS (Input-Output Subsystem), which allowed the disks to be handled more efficiently and an SSD (Solid State Disk), which provided facilities for temporary I/O at speeds substantially faster than using disk.

In 1986, the Cray XMP-22 was replaced by a four processor Cray XMP-48. This system had 4 CPUs, 64 Mbytes of memory and a cycle time of 10.5 nanoseconds (112 MHz), with a theoretical peak performance of 800 Megaflops.


The XMP-48 was replaced in 1990 by a Cray Y-MP 8/8-64. This system had 8 cpus with a cycle time of 8.5 nanoseconds (166 MHz) , and 512 Mbytes of memory. It was also the first ECMWF supercomputer running theUnix operating system - the previous three Cray systems had all used Cray's own proprietary operating system called COS; the YMP used Cray's implementation of Unix called UNICOS, which was based on ATT System V Unix with Berkeley extensions and many enhancements developed by Cray Research Inc. This heralded the gradual introduction of Unix systems at ECMWF - today all of the systems used at ECMWF, from desktop PCs to supercomputers, run some form of Unix.


In 1992 the Y-MP was replaced by a Cray C90, with 16 CPUs and 16 Gbytes of Memory. Each CPU of the C90 had a theoretical peak perfromance of 1 Gigaflop (1000 million arithmetic calculations per second).


Up until this time, all the Cray supercomputers at ECMWF used a shared memory, i.e. each of the processors in the system could access directly any part of the memory. In 1994 ECMWF entered the new world of distributed memory parallel processing, with the installation of a Cray T3D system. This system comprised 128 Alpha microprocessors, each with 128 Mbytes of memory. The processors were connected to form a 3D torus. The major difference with this system was that since the memory was distributed, i.e. attached to each processor, message passing between the processors was required. This meant that substantial changes to the weather forecasting system were required to operate efficiently on this type of architecture. The T3D itself did not have any disks or network connections - these were provided by a small YMP-2E system connected to the T3D by a 200 Mbytes/sec high speed channel.

[Radeonator]

In 1996 the VPP700, the first of three large Fujitsu VPP systems was installed, initially with 36 processors. This was also a distributed memory system, each processor (or PE - processor element) having direct access only to its own memory. The system also incorporated a very high speed interconnect (a fully non-blocking crossbar switch) which allowed messages to be passed from one PE to any other PE with the minimum of latency. The VPP 700 was increased to 116 processors in 1997. Each processor in the VPP700 was capable of 2.2 Gigaflops peak.

In 1998 an additional VPP700E with 48 processors was installed. The VPP700E was very similar to the VPP700, but with slightly faster processors.




In 1999 the VPP5000 was installed, initially with 38 processors. This system was upgraded to its final configuration with 100 PEs in 2000. Each processor in the VPP5000 was capable of a peak performance of 9.6 Gigaflops, more than 4 times faster than those in the VPP700. The sustained performance of the whole VPP5000 was almost 300 Gigaflops.

After providing very good service for many years, the Fujitsu VPP systems were eventually decommissioned at the end of March 2003.




In the second half of 2002, two IBM Cluster 1600 systems, consisting of 30 p690 SMP servers connected by an SP2 switch, were installed and commissioned. These were a departure from the earlier production systems in that they were shared memory scalar (as opposed to vector) systems. The first operational forecasts using this system were produced on 4 March 2003.

In the second half of 2004, these two clusters were replaced by two new IBM clusters each with 70 p690+ servers connected by a pSeries High Performance Switch (also known as a Federation switch)


In the second half of 2006, the above two clusters were replaced by two new IBM clusters each with 155 p5-575+ servers connected by a pSeries High Performance Switch.

While there are about twice as many servers in this system as in the previous one, each server only contains half as many processors (with the same clock frequency). Nevertheless, new architectural features of the POWER 5 system mean that this system is almost twice as powerful as the system it replaced. The first operational forecasts using this system were produced on 15 August 2006.


ImageShack - Hosting :: comparisonoldnewpower5vo8.jpg

[Radeonator]

The IBM Supercomputers


http://www.ecmwf.int/services/comput...R5_cluster.JPG

One of the two IBM POWER5+ Cluster 1600 systems installed at ECMWF


ECMWF's High Performance Computing Facility (HPCF) comprises two identical but independent IBM Cluster 1600 supercomputer systems. The computational basis of this, Phase 4 of the HPCF, is IBM's POWER5+ microprocessor.

Since no single application will require more than half of the total computing resources it was decided that the system would comprise two independent clusters. This has several advantages. Two independent clusters add significantly to the resiliency of the system. For example, if one cluster were to suffer a major failure, the other cluster could still provide a service while the fault is being rectified. Another advantage is increased availability, for instance a system session that requires a whole cluster to be taken out of production for a period of time will only affect half of the system; the other cluster can continue to run production work. A further advantage is flexibility in maintaining and upgrading the operating system. It is possible to install new releases of software on one of the clusters and allow this release to run in production on that cluster, while the other cluster runs the earlier software release, until the time comes for it too to be upgraded.

The equipment is based on pSeries p5-575+ servers interconnected by a low latency high speed network - IBM’s proprietary pSeries High Performance Switch (formerly known as the Federation switch). Each separate cluster comprises approximately 155 pSeries p5-575+ symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) servers (or nodes) for computation, with a further 8 nodes providing I/O and network functionality. Each of the compute nodes has 16 POWER5+ processors and most of them have 32GB of memory, apart from two, which have 128GB. This allows for greater flexibility, especially for serial (non-parallel) programs that require large amounts of memory, but which cannot be converted to parallel programs that could use the memory of multiple nodes.

The pSeries p5-575+ SMP server has eight Dual-Chip Modules (DCMs), each of which contains one POWER5+ microprocessor chip and its associated 32MB level-3 cache chip. Each of the microprocessor chips holds two separate processors (or “cores”) with a clock frequency of 1.9GHz, giving a theoretical peak performance of 7.6 GFLOPS. These processors are capable of running 2 threads concurrently. This is called simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) and has the effect of making each node appear to have 32 (logical) CPUs instead of the 16 (physical) processors (more information about this can be found here). The microprocessor chip also holds the memory controller and a shared 1.9MB level-2 cache within its 276 million transistors.

The low latency high speed network is provided by a dual-plane IBM pSeries High Performance Switch to which each of the p5-575+ nodes is connected via IBM’s proprietary GX-bus. The two switch planes provide increased performance over that of a single plane and also enable the switch to have better resiliency with respect to hardware errors.

Each cluster runs the AIX 5.3 operating system and Cluster Systems Management software (CSM). LoadLeveler is used as the batch subsystem. The multi-cluster version of IBM’s General Parallel File System (MC-GPFS) is used by the clusters. This is a distributed journalled file system that uses token-based mechanisms to ensure file system consistency. It utilises RVSD, the Recoverable Virtual Storage Device feature, to share data at a much higher level of performance than other file sharing mechanisms, such as NFS.

The whole system has about 100TB of FAStT900 (DS4500) fibre channel disks, connected to two IBM TotalStorage SAN256B SAN Directors (highly resilient scalable switches), which form the basis of the fibre channel storage area network (SAN). Six p5-575 nodes on each of the clusters are connected to this SAN and are the RVSD nodes for that cluster.

Each of the two storage controllers within a FAStT disk subsystem has a dual connection to the fibre channel switch fabric. If one controller fails, the FAStT subsystem automatically fails-over to the other controller. If the p5-575 node that normally serves data from a FAStT subsystem loses contact with that subsystem, or if the node itself crashes, then GPFS will automatically fail-over to the RVSD server on another p5-575+ node that has access to the controllers of that FAStT900. Both types of fail-over are seamless and transparent to the application that is reading or writing data on the disks. The FAStT disk subsystem provides for highly-available data at the hardware level, while GPFS and RVSD provide high-availability at the software level.

Because the disks are connected via a SAN that is directly connected to both clusters and because each of the I/O nodes on the clusters is an RVSD server, this means that it is possible for every node, including the compute nodes, to access every disk. This opens up the possibility of having multi-cluster filesystems - filesystems which are mounted concurrently on both clusters as if they were “native” filesystems on each cluster. It is expected that judicious use of MC-GPFS will increase the productivity of the users of ECMWF’s high-performance computing facility.

Besides the two main compute clusters there is also a small “MC-GPFS owning” cluster. This cluster (hpci) comprises four IBM p5-575 servers, and its equipment is set up in a highly redundant fashion. There is little data traffic between “hpci” and the filesystems it “owns” and no user work is allowed to run on it. In this way it is expected that this owning cluster will be highly-available, especially asit is unlikely to suffer problems that systems running a varied mixture of user work tend to experience. This will mean that the filesystems should always be available on both of the production clusters (hpce and hpcf), and if one of the production clusters should crash, or has to be taken out of service for a system session, this should have no effect on the other production cluster.

taken from here:
The IBM Supercomputers*

yang wa kasih ini cuma contoh gimana superkomputer bisa ber-evolusi.... kalau ada contoh lain, tolong kasih tahu yah....

[crazygamer_131]

Weleh-weleh canggih bener dah. Ada komputer gedenya lebih gede dari lemari baju gw. Hehehe

Tapi sayang, bahasa-bahasanya pada sulit dimengerti semua.
Om Radeonator bisa kasih terjemahan istilah2 kompie yang asing kaya flops dsb?

[Radeonator]

kalo wa posting semua, bisa teler lo ntar.
bukannya ada thread khusus buat istilah-istilah khusus kompuer di sini?