Anton 2 raising the bar for performance and programmability in a special-purpose molecular dynamics supercomputer

Anton 2 is a second-generation special-purpose supercomputer for molecular dynamics simulations that achieves significant gains in performance, programmability, and capacity compared to its predecessor, Anton 1. The architecture of Anton 2 is tailored for fine-grained event-driven operation, which i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis pp. 41 - 53
Main Authors: Shaw, David E., Grossman, J. P., Bank, Joseph A., Batson, Brannon, Butts, J. Adam, Chao, Jack C., Deneroff, Martin M., Dror, Ron O., Even, Amos, Fenton, Christopher H., Forte, Anthony, Gagliardo, Joseph, Gill, Gennette, Greskamp, Brian, Ho, C. Richard, Ierardi, Douglas J., Iserovich, Lev, Kuskin, Jeffrey S., Larson, Richard H., Layman, Timothy, Lee, Li-Siang, Lerer, Adam K., Li, Chester, Killebrew, Daniel, Mackenzie, Kenneth M., Mok, Shark Yeuk-Hai, Moraes, Mark A., Mueller, Rolf, Nociolo, Lawrence J., Peticolas, Jon L., Quan, Terry, Ramot, Daniel, Salmon, John K., Scarpazza, Daniele P., Ben Schafer, U., Siddique, Naseer, Snyder, Christopher W., Spengler, Jochen, Tang, Ping Tak Peter, Theobald, Michael, Toma, Horia, Towles, Brian, Vitale, Benjamin, Wang, Stanley C., Young, Cliff
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: Piscataway, NJ, USA IEEE Press 01.11.2014
IEEE
Series:ACM Conferences
Subjects:
Arrays
Biological system modeling
Computational modeling
Computer systems organization > Architectures > Distributed architectures > Grid computing
Computer systems organization > Architectures > Parallel architectures > Multicore architectures
Computer systems organization > Architectures > Serial architectures > Superscalar architectures
Computer systems organization > Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks
Computing methodologies > Modeling and simulation > Simulation types and techniques > Massively parallel and high-performance simulations
Flexible printed circuits
General and reference > Cross-computing tools and techniques > Performance
Hardware
Networks > Network performance evaluation
Pipelines
Random access memory
Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Software system structures > Distributed systems organizing principles > Grid computing
ISBN:1479955000, 9781479955008
ISSN:2167-4329
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Anton 2 is a second-generation special-purpose supercomputer for molecular dynamics simulations that achieves significant gains in performance, programmability, and capacity compared to its predecessor, Anton 1. The architecture of Anton 2 is tailored for fine-grained event-driven operation, which improves performance by increasing the overlap of computation with communication, and also allows a wider range of algorithms to run efficiently, enabling many new software-based optimizations. A 512-node Anton 2 machine, currently in operation, is up to ten times faster than Anton 1 with the same number of nodes, greatly expanding the reach of all-atom biomolecular simulations. Anton 2 is the first platform to achieve simulation rates of multiple microseconds of physical time per day for systems with millions of atoms. Demonstrating strong scaling, the machine simulates a standard 23,558-atom benchmark system at a rate of 85 μs/day---180 times faster than any commodity hardware platform or general-purpose supercomputer.
ISBN:1479955000
9781479955008
ISSN:2167-4329
DOI:10.1109/SC.2014.9