Friday, June 20, 2008

Cache & Packets

Voltaire in love with the modern world of petaflops

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

While the Modern Lovers’ 1972 anthem “Roadrunner” celebrated cruising the suburbs of Boston at high speeds (with the radio on!), singer Jonathan Richman never explicitly revealed how fast he was going.

However fast it was, last week IBM Corp. likely blew away Richman’s Roadrunner speed with the announcement that its new supercomputer, dubbed RoadRunner, broke the petaflop barrier — achieving 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second — to become the fastest computer in the world.

The connection between Richman’s cruising speed and RoadRunner’s processing speed may be tenuous, but the two share Bay State roots. Born in Natick, Richman gained national notoriety with his classic Roadrunner song. Thirty-five years later and 26 miles away, Billerica-based Voltaire Ltd. is earning its own national recognition as an integral part of IBM’s supercomputer project.

IBM selected Voltaire last year to provide interconnect switches to the RoadRunner project, according to Patrick Guay, Voltaire’s general manager. In the end, 26 of Voltaire’s switches were used in the final cluster, linking 16 racks of IBM servers to create the fastest computer the world has ever seen.

But the RoadRunner project is about more than “I’m the fastest” chest-thumping. RoadRunner beat the previous record holder, IBM’s BlueGene, by almost double the speed, and broke the one-petaflop (one quadrillion floating point operations per second) barrier. “For the past two years, as an industry, we have been trying to reach one petaflop,” said Guay.

As for practical applications, the $100 million RoadRunner will be housed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and will be used by the U.S.  Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration to help ensure the stability and usability of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. In addition, the agency will open up the system to outside, unclassified use for the first six months. Research could include everything from complex weather patterns to financial modeling to cloud computing.

For Voltaire, the success of RoadRunner represents a big boost for Infiniband, a cluster computing interconnect platform that competes with Fibrechannel, Ethernet and other standards. Since its inception in 1997, and through its IPO in 2007, Voltaire has been betting on the Infiniband architecture, developing interconnect products for cluster computing systems in a number of industries, including government research and financial services.

“I think you’re going to see a lot of people looking at the architecture here and saying ‘OK, it’s been done and it’s been proven that it can be scaled,’” said Guay.

The partnership with IBM has also borne fruit. While the two companies have been working together for “several years” according to Guay, Voltaire last February renewed its original equipment manufacturer deal with Big Blue, extending it into 2010.

Springfield embiggens energy cost savings

The city of Springfield last week became the latest municipality to use an online auction format to buy electricity for its community electric company. According to officials, the auction proved successful in providing both cost certainty and an efficient transaction.

At the end of the process, Springfield came away saving $500,000 — 5 percent less than the city had allocated — in power costs over the next five years. The total bill for Springfield’s five-year supply of electricity, which averages about 48 million kilowatt hours per year, was $47.5 million.

The city used an auction platform from World Energy Solutions Inc. in Worcester, which has been developing energy auction systems for several years. The company makes a point of only representing one side in each transaction it executes — the buy side or the sell side — so the system has been set up to handle many kinds of energy auctions, from simple supply agreements like that of Springfield, to forward auctions focused on the sale of renewable energy credits.

The use of online forums — think eBay for energy trading — is something that will surely increase as the buying, selling and trading of power and related commodities (such as carbon credits) gets more complex.

World Energy’s platform bears watching because it is the same system that will help the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) execute what organizers call the first auction of carbon emissions allowances in the country, next September. Put simply, the auction will allow companies to buy, sell and trade their capacity for emitting carbon dioxide. Ideally, organizers hope to put a tangible value on unused allowances, encouraging companies to reduce their emissions.

The details of how the auction will work have not been released, but World Energy president and COO Phil Adams said that, whatever the final rules of the auction are, the technology behind the process will be much the same as with the Springfield auction. Hopefully it will prove as successful.