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Barcelona Supercomputing Center Develops Advanced Prototype
Based on Cell and Power6 processors, the new supercomputer prototype will increase the computing capacity at the service of the European scientific community
BARCELONA, Spain, July 30 -- The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) has a new supercomputer prototype, to be used in the European project PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe). PRACE aims to consolidate the bases of a European supercomputing infrastructure, and BSC is one the main partners. The work done with this prototype, called MariCel (in Catalan means Sea and Sky), will help to define the hardware components and the software stack of a future machine. The future system will have a minimum capacity of 10 petaflops and will be at the service of the European scientific community. This represents a calculation capacity of ten times more than the current most powerful in the world, according to the last TOP500 list.
"MariCel is part of an initiative to create a common supercomputing structure for Europe. On this prototype, similar to the architecture of the American Roadrunner, we will test the latest software technologies, some of them developed at the BSC. We think that in Spain we will be able to install supercomputers 100 times more powerful than the current MareNostrum in 2011 or 2012," says Francesc Subirada, associate director of BSC. The Kaleidoscope project code will be run on this new prototype. Kaleidoscope is carried out by BSC and Repsol and its focus is to optimize and execute in MareNostrum, as well as in Cell processors, the Reverse Time Migration (RTM) codes used in next generation seismic imaging technology. It is expected that these codes will accelerate and streamline oil and gas exploration by several orders of magnitude compared to current industry standards.
目前的 Roadrunner 已经部署完毕,而这里说的新 "Roadrunner-style" 超级计算机正式名称应该是 "MariCel",采用 Power6+Cell 的异质架构,设计性能目标为 10 Petaflops,为目前最快的超级计算机 Roadrunner 的10倍。 |
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