Pavel Kostenetskiy, head of the Laboratory of Supercomputer Modeling definitely knows that the qualified staff and technological capabilities at South Ural State University are able to bring the university's innovative developments to the international level. One of the first in this list is the supercomputer. The laboratory head told our correspondent about how supercomputers are created, what calculations are completed on it, and who orders those calculations.
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The Laboratory of Supercomputer Modeling solves numerous scientific tasks in industry, engineering, natural and hard sciences, and human sciences. Within the 5-100 Project and SUSU becoming a research university, the laboratory was able to bring together all these research areas into one complex of research, strengthened by calculations completed on the supercomputer.
“At this time there are no modern technologies that can be created without supercomputing. If you need to achieve the best work capacity, minimum energy use, or form high-accuracy instruments – all of this requires a supercomputer. And the more a strong supercomputer works on a task, the more an accurate instrument can be modeled and created in real life,” says Pavel Sergeevich.
The head of the Laboratory of Supercomputer Modeling told us that the average person's understanding of supercomputers is sometimes quite funny.
“There was a time when a person who is not a specialist in supercomputing came to us on an excursion. He entered the laboratory, looked around, and saw a laptop sitting in the center. This was the notebook we used to make powerpoint slides. He looked at it and then said, 'Oh! What a small supercomputer!' This was very funny, since the real supercomputer was all around him.”
There are a few definitions of supercomputer, but there is no one official one. This is because the definition of “supercomputer” is based on the strength of such a machine. Progress in the IT sphere moves quickly, and in 10 years, today's strongest supercomputer will be as powerful as a new PC.
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“There is one unofficial definition: a supercomputer is a computer thousands of times more powerful than a modern PC. SUSU Tornado, with 473.6 Teraflops of computing power, consisting of 480 computing nodes and with 29184 cores, is number 8 in the Top 50 strongest computers in the CIS,” says Pavel Kostenetskiy, “The supercomputer differentiates itself by its high energy efficiency which is thanks to a system of direct liquid cooling.”
The SUSU supercomputer is built using Intel Xeon server processors and Intel Xeon Phi multicore accelerators. The whole cluster is a combination of 480 single-type servers, which are joined together by a high-speed 40 Gigabit Infiniband network. The supercomputer
The supercomputer has a very complicated communication network with “fat tree” topology. Thanks to this connection, the computing strength of the supercomputer is hundreds of times higher than when using the typical hierarchical star topology, which requires 10 times less commutators and cables. Thanks to this communication network, the whole server can work on the same computing task, functioning as one super computer.
“Such a strong supercomputer can be compared to a human. At first, humans counted in books, then calculators appeared, computers, and then supercomputers. At this time, our supercomputer – SUSU Tornado, completes 473 trillion operations consisting of 38 digits in one second. If you assume that a good mathematician can complete one such operation in a minute, then it would take him around 90,000 years to complete the same number of calculations a supercomputer does in 1 second,” says Pavel Kostenetskiy.
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The thing is that there are two kinds of computing tasks: analytically solvable (by formula) by a typical computer, and finite element tasks. The second task is better suited for supercomputers. For example, you need to calculate the movement of an air stream in the turbine of a plane engine. This is a very difficult task which is impossible to describe analytically. To complete such calculations, researchers have learned to divide the whole object into tens of millions of pieces in the supercomputer memory so that each of them completed tens of calculations. This number of calculations must be completed for each microsecond of the modeling process. The process of engine work itself takes a lot of time. The strength of a supercomputer is needed to bring all of this data together and see how engines need to be improved. The stronger the supercomputer the more precise the results of solving these tasks will be.
“Calculations for engines for the newest Russian passenger aircraft, Irkut MS 21 (long-distance airplane of the 21st century), which literally days ago completed its first flight, were executed on our supercomputer. This is the first Russian passenger plane which was created using only Russian technologies. Aircraft building is just one of the many areas where calculations on supercomputers are not just important but necessary,” explains Pavel Sergeevich.
Today, the Laboratory of Supercomputer Modeling offers computing services for state and commercial projects. In addition, the supercomputer is actively used for the completion of research work. Russian corporations are just beginning their path of using the possibilities of supercomputers. If supercomputers are “today” for foreign industrial giants, then for a few Russian companies they are the future.
“With the help of a supercomptuer, the development of a new model of automobile takes no more than 3 years abroad. In Russia, the design of a new vehicle takes about 10 years. Now the Russian automobile industry has also begun to use the possibilities of supercomputers, not consistently but experimentally. So, at this time there are not many qualified workers in Russia able to service and work on a supercomputer. Thanks to the fact that our supercomputer is part of the university, we are able to train the staff who work with us ourselves. I must say that system administrators who work on such complex machines are very rare and valuable staff,” explains Pavel Kostenetskiy.
In all the university's master's programs related to technical and natural sciences, the staff of the Laboratory of Supercomputer Modeling offers a course entitled Supercomputer Modeling. This was done so that SUSU graduates knew the basics of working with supercomputers and can independently complete high-power calculations required in industrial manufacturing to create modern, hi-tech products.