Supercomputer flexibility increased by virtualised operating system

Supercomputers have sprung up across the world landscape like the statues on Easter Island - separate, huge, and impenetrable to the average person. They perform hundreds of trillion calculations per second, a figure almost ungraspable by a species that may have entered mathematics by first counting on its fingers.

But new work on Sandia National Laboratories' Red Storm supercomputer - the 17th fastest in the world - is helping to make supercomputers more accessible, in effect removing them from the solitary confinement of their specialized operating systems.

Sandia researchers, working hand in hand with researchers from Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico, socialised 4,096 of Red Storm's total 12,960 computer nodes into accepting a virtual external operating system - a leap of at least two orders of magnitude over previous such efforts.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, for the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.

''The goal is to create a more flexible environment for all users,'' said Sandia researcher Kevin Pedretti, who led Sandia researchers in adapting and optimising a Northwestern program called Palacios for the Red Storm environment. Sandia researchers directed the testing effort.

Built by Sandia as part of the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) program to ensure the safety, security and effectiveness of the nation's nuclear stockpile without testing, Red Storm's advanced computational capabilities are also being utilised in unclassified modes to contribute to global efforts to combat climate change, evaluate dangers from possible asteroid strikes, and help solve other problems of national interest.