California Digital & Lawrence Livermore
Deploy Fastest Linux Cluster
23 Teraflop Peak System Is World's Second Fastest
FREMONT, CA, MAY 13, 2004
Linux cluster vendor California Digital, Quadrics, and Intel
today announced that they had successfully deployed the most powerful
Linux supercomputer ever built, a 4,096 Itanium2 processor based
Linux cluster code named "Thunder" at Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory.
The Thunder cluster delivers 19.94 teraflops of sustained
performance, making it the most powerful computer in North
America. Thunder also boasts the largest Itanium 2 processor deployment,
as well as the largest implementation of Quadrics' low-latency
QsNet^II interconnect technology. These technologies allow Thunder
to achieve record cluster efficiency of 86.9%, an important metric
in measuring cluster scalability.
"We're proud to have successfully delivered such a ground-breaking
Linux cluster with world-record performance and efficiency,"
reported California Digital CEO B.J.Arun. "Thunder sets important
benchmarks for massively-parallel Linux computing. "For years,
supercomputers have been a high-tech, exclusive domain for big
players with deep pockets. The lowest estimate of Japan's Earth
Simulator is $350 million.
"Our machine costs only $20 million," Arun said. "For
a small-size company like ours - we are just about 100 people
worldwide - for a company of our size to have done this, I can't
explain to you how thrilled all of us were."
He added that they were helped by their research staff in Bangalore.
"We've done it primarily by leveraging a lot of our engineering
in the US primarily in India," he said. "We've got a
subsidiary in Bangalore which provides a lot of the professional
skills that are very necessary to be able to produce such deployments."
His firm's CTO is Srinidhi Varadarajan, the brilliant computer
scientist who hit national headlines by building the world's third
fastest supercomputer by networking a cluster of Apple G5 servers.
Varadarajan's groundbreaking patented innovation is Déjà
vu, a software that helps avoid breakdowns.
"Déjà vu allows commodity structures that
we are building to be extremely reliable," Arun said. "One
of the last barriers between why somebody pays $300-400 million
on this mainframe machine versus what we built is this reliability
angle. And we have completely removed that last barrier."
Thunder uses 1,024 California Digital 6440 servers, each
with four Intel Itanium2 1.4GHz processors with 4MB of cache,
8GB of RAM, and 73GB of local storage. "Working with California
Digital and Lawrence Livermore has been a great opportunity to
demonstrate the absolute performance and scalability that can
be achieved with Intel's Itanium2 processor" said Intel Enterprise
Platforms General Manager Richard Dracott.
Thunder's efficiency and scalability rest on the strength
of its sophisticated interconnect technology, Quadrics' QsNet^II
offering. QsNet^II (Elan4) provides the underlying high bandwidth
and low latency MPI communications required by today's demanding
scalable applications. With support for broadcast in hardware
and scaleable collective operations, QsNet^II scales clusters
efficiently to over 4,000 nodes.
Despite the technical sophistication of Thunder and the incorporation
of new technologies, California Digital deployed Thunder in
five months, speeding delivery of computing solutions to support
Lawrence Livermore's national security and science programs in
fields such as materials science, structural mechanics, electromagnetics,
atmospheric science, seismology, biology, and inertial confinement
fusion.
"Thunder represents the next generation of Linux cluster
for scientific simulation," remarked Mark Seager, Livermore's
Assistant Department Head for Advanced Technology. "Our applications
are seeing a 50% to 400% speed up over our Xeon base clusters."
Thunder uses a number of innovative open-source software
tools developed by California Digital and Lawrence Livermore to
manage the cluster effectively, leveraging the industry-leading
remote management capability of Intel's Itanium2 system family.
California Digital has
released a number of these tools under open source licenses as
part of its freeIPMI project for server management and configuration.
B.J. Arun brings
over 20 years of leadership experience in the Enterprise Technical
Computing industry. Arun co-founded California Digital in San
Jose, CA in 1994 and has run the company profitably every since.
He set up India's first Linux only company when he set up California
Digital (India) Private limited as a wholly owned subsidiary in
1999.
Arun orchestrated the acquisition of the assets
of VA Linux Systems (Nasdaq: LNUX) in 2001 which catapulted California
Digital into a market leadership position in the space of Linux
based High Performance Computing and related software services.
Prior to California Digital, Arun served in Product
Marketing for Micronics Computers (Nasdaq: MCRN), a leader in
the design and manufacture of high end X86 based motherboards.
He was responsible for defining the technology road map for the
company's industry leading designs of server and desktop products.
Arun is a charter member of TiE, The Indus Entrepreneurs,
a not-for-profit global network of entrepreneurs and professionals
dedicated to the advancement of entrepreneurship.
Arun currently sits on the Board of Advisors for
Intel Corporation's Premier Providers.
Arun holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science
from the Bangalore University (India).
About California Digital
California Digital is a privately held company
with worldwide headquarters in Fremont, California and Engineering
and Development Centers in Blacksburg, Virginia and Bangalore,
India. California Digital acquired the systems division of VA
Linux Systems (now VA Software) in late 2001 and re-launched VA's
server business thereafter.
California Digital focuses on providing massively-parallel
Linux or OS X compute clusters to enterprise technical computing
customers in various vertical markets such as manufacturing, oil
and gas exploration, bioinformatics, financial services, and digital
content creation.
California Digital provides turnkey cluster solutions,
including system and interconnect integration, software support
and configuration, application optimization and porting, performance
tuning, and comprehensive cluster manageement tools.
California Digital customers can reduce costs
by up to 90% by migrating compute-intensive applications away
from proprietary, "big iron" UNIX systems to massively
parallel Linux or OS X clusters. Toward this end, California Digital
offers turn-key clusters completely supported and configured to
run required applications upon delivery and commissioning.
California Digital personnel have deployed two
of the five most powerful supercomputers on Earth -- the 19.94
teraflop "Thunder" cluster at Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory and the 10.28 teraflop System X at Virginia Tech.
California Digital specializes in 64-bit computing
solutions and deploying leading-edge technology to further the
adoption of massively-paralelle cluster computing.
