Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Selects IBM Technology to Power Cloud Computing Research

*November 16, 2009 *

http://www.lbl.gov/cs/Archive/news111609.html

*Berkeley Lab Contact: Jon Bashor, jbashor@lbl.gov
, 510-501-2230*
*IBM Contact: Joanna Brewer, jmbrewer@us.ibm.com
, 415-971-2777*

*Armonk, NY and Berkeley, CA —* IBM and the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) announced today that an IBM System x iDataPlex
server will run the Lab's program to explore how cloud computing can be
used to advance scientific discovery.

The program, dubbed Magellan, is funded by the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The
Magellan system will be a test bed for National Energy Research
Scientific Computing Division (NERSC) scientists to explore the
effectiveness of cloud computing for their particular research problems.
Ultimately, the project will benefit society by allowing scientists to
accelerate discoveries in such disciplines as energy efficiency, climate
change and genomics.

The Magellan Project will use IBM's newest iDataPlex dx360 M2 server,
which features double the memory and even higher power efficiency than
previous versions. Harnessing iDataPlex's innovative half-depth design
and liquid-cooled door, clients can lower cooling costs by as much as
half and reduce floor space requirements by 30 percent.

The iDataPlex is on the list of most energy efficient computers in the
world, the Green500 List. Berkeley Lab's iDataPlex system will have a
theoretical peak speed of more than 60 teraflops and will be used to
explore a set of possible software configurations for science clouds.

While DOE centers operate some of the world's most powerful
supercomputers, many researchers do not require such massive computing
power. Cloud computing makes it efficient for the Lab to also support
scientists with modest-size computing problems.

"Cloud computing has tremendous potential to accelerate scientific
discoveries by making computing resources readily available to the
masses of scientists. Rather than buying and managing their own cluster,
a researcher can simply access a virtual cluster within the cloud. We
expect many of the NERSC users to take advantage of Magellan for real
scientific work, and at the same time we will be conducting research on
how to build and manage science clouds," said Kathy Yelick, head of the
NERSC Division at Berkeley Lab. "We evaluated a number of different
technologies and concluded that IBM iDataPlex would deliver the best
value to complete this important research."

The Magellan research team will deploy a large cloud test bed with 5,760
processor cores on iDataPlex to evaluate a variety of DOE scientific
applications, from power grid simulations to nanoparticle analysis and
analyzing climate change data.

The Magellan Project will help the DOE determine which scientific
applications demonstrate the best performance in the cloud and what
software and processes are necessary for those applications to take
advantage of cloud services.

For more information about the Magellan Project, click here
.

*About NERSC and Berkeley Lab*
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)
is the primary high-performance computing
facility for scientific research sponsored by the U.S. Department of
Energy’s Office of Science. Berkeley Lab is a U.S.
Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley,
California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed
by the University of California for the DOE Office of Science.

For more information about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab, please
visit: www.lbl.gov/cs

*About IBM*
For more information about IBM, please visit www.ibm.com.