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BOF: "How Did We Get Here?" Gordon Design and Planning

Appro will hold a drawing for a $200 amazon.com gift card at this BOF. Details available at the event.

Steve Lyness and Shawn Strande

Abstract -- Learn how Appro, Intel and San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) at the University of California collaborated for a major design win with a skip-generation architecture called “Gordon” Supercomputer three years in advance of the system being deployed. Learn how this early preparation resulted in a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to allow this system to be built and be available to offer a powerful supercomputer resource dedicated to solving critical science and societal problems using advanced HPC technology. Discover what is behind the Gordon design innovations, the processors, flash memory, interconnect network and the entire system configuration. Explore the ideas and planning of how industry trends, partnerships, early access to future technology roadmaps and system configuration adjustments were used to extrapolate to the time the system would actually be built. Learn how reliability, availability, manageability and system configuration compatibility were essential for this successful data intensive supercomputer be able to deliver over 200 TFlops of peak performance and up to 35M IOPS from 300TB of Solid State Storage. Also, learn how Gordon’s scientific applications benefit from fast interaction and manipulation of large volumes of structured data and how Gordon is helping the HPC research community by being available through an open-access national grid.