Bushfire and flooding in Australia

I have stayed in Cairns, northeast seashore in Australia from middle of last week as originally planned. It is natural that there is much precipitation this time because of rainy season in tropical climate region, but it was special this year and rivers in the northern part of Queensland flooded due to heavy rain, and ferocious crocodiles moved from rivers to residential area of some town this year.

Since main roads from southern area flooded, tracks were not able to reach to Cairns and vegetables have been swept away in supermarket. Fortunately trunk roads became available just a day before my stay, there were rich foods and clean town and I did not imagine heavy flooding, and couldn't find influence by large flood. Although it was quite fine, weather reports of a TV is continuing passing forecast of cloudy and thunderstorm every day. I guess Australian doesn’t care weather forecast so much compared with Japanese.

On the other hand, huge bush fire, once in 100 years, continued and troops just deployed. in the southeast part (the State of Victoria) of Australian. I remember that ABC TV news reporters always spoke "it is still uncontrolled".

Southeastern Australia has many trees of the eucalyptus which a koala likes, and leaves contain a lot of oil. Therefore, it is said that the bushfire is a natural phenomenon of Australia (or the seeds of a eucalyptus carry out prout at the high temperature during bush fire.

Anyway, fire scale is getting large and only this also becomes a social problem from a thing with many persons who lost all of their property and their life, and warning and correspondence of the authorities having been overdue etc.

However bushfire happens in very large scale, and there are many persons who lost entire properties or even their life, and warning and right actions by authorities were postponed. It will be getting political issues later.

Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) is the keyword to know why such serious drought has happened in southeastern Australia. IOD is discovered by Dr. Yamagata, Program Director of Frontier Research Center for Global Change, JAMSTEC, et al., in 1999, and it was published in Nature.

Moreover, they succeeded in prediction of the dipole mode phenomena in Indian Ocean using Erath Simulator supercomputer in 2007. It was the first time in the world.

It is linked to reduction of disaster how deeply Australian government understands such research findings, and make progress in right actions against risk of drought.However, reality has already showed answer.


I expected an adventure travel this time. But anything happened. The only trouble is our flight (JetStar, known due to cheaper airfare) from Cairns that delayed almost 6 hours, and arrived in Osaka midnight instead of Tokyo.

NNSA awards IBM Contract to Build Next Generation Supercomputer

The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced a contract with IBM to bring world-leading supercomputing systems to its Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to help continue to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation’s aging nuclear deterrent on February 3, 2009.

IBM will deliver two systems: Sequoia, a 20 PetaFLOPS system based on future Blue Gene technology, to be delivered starting in 2011 and deployed in 2012; and an initial delivery system called Dawn, a 500 TeraFLOPS Blue Gene/P system, scheduled for delivery in the first quarter of 2009. Dawn will lay the applications foundation for multi-PetaFLOPS computing on Sequoia.

Sequoia’s delivery and deployment schedule seems to be similar to Next Generation Supercomputer R&D Projec of Japant which completes delivery by March, 2012 (End of FY2011). Hence both supercomputer projects will compete in performance and delivery/deployment schedule each other.

Sequoia will have 1.6 Petabytes of memory, 96 racks, 98,304 compute nodes, and 1.6 million cores. It means that we will enter 1 million core system era soon. I cannot expect what happens in application code point of view.

Anyway, the House Democratic leadership has released an official stimulus summary on January 15 and it looks great. After that, Senate deal protects much of NSF Increase in Stimulus and there are a lot of gaps between both budget plans as shown in Computing Research Policy (CRA) blog. We need to watch progress of U.S. Stimulus plan in HPC view against current economic crisis for a while.

U.S. has been mainly driving HPC from the beginning. It may, thereby, be not surprized even if anything unexpected happens in HPC due to the crisis.

"Cray CX1 Experience Seminar" in Tokyo

There was a Cray CX1 Experience Seminar was held by Cray Japan in the afternoon of January 27 in Akihabara Convention Hall in Tokyo. Cray CX1 is the system which I was interested in since I found it which was put casually on the floor in the SC08’s Cray booth last November.

It was a good opportunity for me to attend this seminar since I left IBM and am not in any vendors now. (In this industry, we usually do not accept a competitor's entry to seminars mutually.) Many thanks to the courtesy of the Nakano-san, president of Cray Japan with decades-knowing.

As shown next, the seminar was organized as all-in-one about Cray CX-1 probably similar to CX-1 itself. Therefore it was a galloping seminar. But it was an intelligible seminar and I enjoyed it.

The conference room with 130 seats was almost full with attendees. That means that many people had various kinds of interests about the Cray's personal supercomputer with Accelerators.

(Program)
- Trend of HPC (Cray Japan)
- CX1 overview and its advantage (Cray Japan)
- Parallel Computing by CUDA: Prologue (NVIDIA Japan)
- CX1 Demonstration
(1) Employment of SCRYU/Tetra and LS-DYNA with Cray CX1 Job Launcher (Cray Japan)
(2) SCRYU/Tetra Demonstration on Windows HPC Server 2008 (Software Cradle)
(3) LS-DYNA Demonstration (JSOL)
- CPU information and the latest road map (Intel)
- Efforts of Microsoft for HPC (Microsoft)

Cray CX1 looks one of typical small blade servers which can work by 100V power, for example, IBM Blade Center S. Cray provides a computing blade (two models), a storage blade (two models), and a graphics blade which includes NVIDIA QUADRO FX series or TESLA inside. Since it costs several million yen for four blade-configuration models in a campaign price according to a Cray brochure given in the seminar), the price range is in the Workgroup Server. It looks unusual that Cray which has a track record in supercomputer market of hundreds of million yen offers products for workgroup server, the minimum price range of HPC servers. They are going to enhance Cray CX-1 and follow-on systems in cooperation with Intel, NVIDIA and Microsoft.

According to a talk by NVIDIA, because TESLA is just an expensive and professional QUADRO without graphics function, they provide it around half the price of QUADRO. (In addition, it is supported by huge sales volume and revenue by GEFORCE in consumers market.) They target twice in 18 months for performance improvement. The NVIDIA speaker said that double precision feature had been added last November.

They reported that the number of downloads of CUDA, application development environment for GPU, already exceeded 120,000. CUDA ZONE web site may show such prosperous situation in development of GPU applications.

The CX1 demonstration of SCRYU/Tetra by the Software Cradle, well-known CAE software vendor in Japan, was a CFD calculation applied to an intake manifold and an engine cylinder. It is almost scalable up to eight cores for 180k element-model and up to 16 cores for 1 to 8 million element models (Approx. 10 times faster in 16 cores than 1 core. The performance is not sensitive to a number of elements for 1 million or more element case. InfiniBand is used. )

JSOL (Former Japan Research Institute Solutions) demonstrated the LS-DYNA standard problems (Neon refined and 3 Vehicle Collision) for automotive crash analysis. Their results showed a good scalability up to 32 cores. (26.8 times (IB interconnect) or 23.7 times (GbE interconnect) faster in 32 cores that single core)

I wonder why performance differences are so small between a high bandwidth and low latency IB case and a low speed GbE case. Maybe, both codes are already well tuned in order to minimize communication for moderately parallel computing (I do not confirm it yet).

If such ISV's CAE software could show scalable performance and an acceptable licensing fee structure up to 1,024 cores or more, Industrial sector's usage in HPC would be much more accelerated to larger systems, considering trends of HPC platforms. If so, many things will change. Do you agree?