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Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013
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| 1:00p | Encanto Supercomputer May Be ‘Sold in Pieces’  The Encanto supercomputer has been repossessed by the state of New Mexico, which provided much of the funding for the project, and may be sold in pieces to three state universities. A supercomputer that was the third-fastest machine in the world in 2008 has been repossessed by the state of New Mexico and will likely be sold for parts to three universities, local media reported last week. The state has been unable to find a buyer for the Encanto supercomputer, which was built and maintained with $20 million in state funding. Last summer the administration of Gov. Susana Martinez took control of the supercomputer, saying the non-profit New Mexico Computing Applications Center could no longer afford to maintain the machine. This week state officials told the Albuquerque Journal that no single buyer has emerged. As a result, the state is likely to divide the machine up and sell it by the cabinet to state universities that could repurpose the hardware. “Barring someone offering to buy the whole machine, we can still get piecemeal use from it,” state Information Technology Secretary Darryl Ackley told the paper. “The universities have proposed to cannibalize it to put some of the assets back into service.” Encanto is composed of 28 racks of processors. Each rack has 500 processors, for a total of 14,000 cores that together can perform 172 trillion calculations per second. UNM wants to take 10 of the computing racks. New Mexico State University wants four, and the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology would take two racks. Encanto is housed at an Intel data center in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. It features a water-cooled SGI Altix ICE 8200 cluster with a power load of 32 kilowatts per cabinet. It runs over an Infiniband network connected to the National Lambda Rail network. The supercomputer had the enthusiastic backing of Gov. Bill Richardson, who saw the project as an economic development tool for New Mexico. But the commercial projects did not materialize, and Martinez did not support the project. “I think that the supercomputer is a symbol of excess,” Martinez said after taking office in early 2011. “We have analyzed the situation. We have seen what the previous administration has invested in it. And we have looked to see what we have gotten back in revenue. It doesn’t match up. It’s unacceptable to the taxpayer, so we’ve got to stop investing good dollars into that project because it’s not proving itself to be useful whatsoever.” Here’s a technical overview of Encanto from Intel in happier times for the project. This video runs 3 minutes, 30 seconds. |
| 1:30p | Exascalar Results from November 2012: Part 1 Winston Saunders has worked at Intel for nearly two decades and currently leads server and data center efficiency initiatives. Winston is a graduate of UC Berkeley and the University of Washington. You can find him online at “Winston on Energy” on Twitter. He previously wrote on Exascalar in an article titled, Exascalar 2012: HPC Performance Meets Efficiency, in June.  WINSTON SAUNDERSIntel With the recent publication of the Top500 and Green500 lists of the world’s most powerful and efficient supercomputers, it’s time to pull together another look at Exascalar. As I noted in this blog post, “The biggest challenge facing high-performance technical computing is to deliver an Exaflop per second. What makes the problem challenging is not just the achievement of that scale of computing performance, but to do it within a ‘reasonable’ power budget of 20MW as Kirk Skaugen recently announced.” Supercomputing: Both Performance & EfficiencyRecall that Exascalar defines supercomputing leadership through a combination of Top500 (performance) and Green500 (efficiency) data to understand both evolution and revolution in supercomputing architecture and scale. Exascalar is the “logarithmic distance” to 1018 flops in a 20 MegaWatt power envelope. As the current analysis shows the current leader has an Exascalar of 2.22 (i.e. a factor of 166). The leading Exascalar in June 2011 was 2.75, or about a factor of four lower in either performance or efficiency. On this round, I plan to break up the discussion into three blogs: the first will focus on the Exascalar analysis itself, the second will dig a little deeper into the data and underlying trends, and the third will discuss some recent, and potentially controversial, insights into Exascalar taxonomy. Exascalar Top 10The November 2012 Exascalar (Performance-Efficiency Scalar) Top 10 list is shown below. The biggest change is at the top of the list, the new DPE/SC/Oak Ridge National Laboratory system with a best-ever Exascalar of 2.22. Since Exascalar is logarithmic, this equates to about a factor of 166 from the Exascalar goals in efficiency and performance. In June 2012, the peak Exascalar was 2.26, about a 10 percent improvement from the June 2012 list.  Click to enlarge. This time I’ve included the Performance and Efficiency scalars (the log of performance and efficiency relative to the Exascale goals) as an aid to understanding how Exascalar is calculated. I feel this also provides greater insight than does the ordinal ranking of efficiency and performance into what constitutes leadership. I’ll discuss this in greater detail in my next blog. In all, there are four new or changed systems on the list. The Forschungszentrum Juelich system had a big jump in performance since the last publication and the Leibniz Rechenzentrum improved from an Exascalar of 3.12 to 3.10. A new entry on the list is the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas system, rounding out the Top 10 list at an Exascalar of 3.28. This is over a 20 percent improvement in the Top 10 score since June.  Click to enlarge. The Exascalar graph of the data shows the familiar triangular shape. There are good reasons for the triangular shape (though ideally it will turn into a trapezoid, as I will discuss in the third blog of this series). The familiar column due primarily to the BlueGene/Q family of computers remains prevalent at an efficiency of about 2000 Mflops/Watt. However, there are some new entrants in this efficiency range and these will become apparent in the next blog. The green trend-line of the Top Exascalar extending back to 2007 in the above figure shows the expected proportionality to efficiency and underscores the primary dependence of performance on efficiency. The Top 10 Exascalar value, shown as the red arc in the figure, improved from 3.39 in June 2012 to its current value of 3.08. Note that most of the systems in the Top10 benefit from high efficiency and all but four are in the dominant populations of highest efficiency. In the next two blogs, I’ll look into some of the trends behind Exascalar and also some insights into the taxonomy of Exascalar. Until then, your comments (add them below) are appreciated. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. |
| 3:46p | Equinix Tops Data Center Stock Winners for 2012 Equinix was the best-performing data center stock for 2012, more than doubling in value over the year. The 103 percent gain for Equinix was the headline in a mixed year for publicly-held companies in the data center sector, with excellent gains for some companies while some of the historic bellwethers for the industry trailed broader market indicators. Equinix (EQIX), which provides colocation and interconnection services in major markets, benefited from its announcement that it will convert to a real estate investment trust (REIT) and issue a special dividend to shareholders when it completes the process, probably in 2014. The company also continued to show progress in its efforts to build industry-specific “ecosystems” in its data centers, which serve as connectivity hubs for key vertical markets including financial services, cloud computing, and content delivery. Equinix shares had improved by 25 percent in 2011. Interxion (INXN) and Rackspace Hosting (RAX) each gained more than 70 percent in value during the year, reflecting ongoing interest in companies supporting the growth of cloud computing. Interxion provides data center space and interconnection services in major European markets, while Rackspace is a leading player in public cloud computing services and was the sector’s top performer in 2011 . Here’s a look at the full-year performance chart for our Data Center Investor list of stocks.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 7.26 percent for 2012, while the S&P 500 finished up 13.4 percent for the year and the NASDAQ index improved by 15.91 percent. Among the data center REITs, CoreSite Realty (COR) also recorded its second consecutive year of solid gains for its investors, with a 55 percent gain following on a 30 percent uptick in 2011. Two of the sector’s historic leaders, Digital Realty Trust (DLR) and DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT), trailed the market this year. Digital Realty shares gained 1.8 percent, while DuPont Fabros ticked down by 0.2 percent for the year. Remember to track our Data Center Investor channel for performance updates on data center companies. For tracking individual stocks, you can see our “Companies” page, or just type the company’s ticker symbol into our search box. |
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