“Sunrise. The harvest of sunlight begins.”
“Plants –from microscopic algae to giant sequoias---converting
radiant solar energy into chemical energy stores.”
“It’s a process billions of years old. Millions of years of that process created
a biomass that eventually became today’s fossil fuels.”
“With those fossil fuel reserves dwindling, the scientific race is on to convert the sunlight
harvested by plants into new fuels that will augment and eventually replace petroleum.”
“It’s a critical challenge. But there is a powerful tool tackling it: Sandia National
Laboratories’ Red Sky Supercomputer with a special cluster called Red Mesa dedicated
specifically to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
Red Sky advances the legacy of the Sandia red machines that preceded it, ASCI Red and
Red Storm.”
“Red Sky was designed to support national security projects and energy security is critical
to national security. That’s why NREL is using the Red Mesa cluster on Red Sky in the
quest to transform biomass into biofuel.”
“One of the best biomass to biofuel candidates is corn.”
“But not this part.”
“This part.”
“That’s right, the part that is normally considered waste like stalks, leaves and cobs.”
“One reason NREL is targeting the cellulose part of corn is because corn is the largest
crop grown in the U.S. There is a well-established infrastructure supporting its distribution
that could also be used for fuel.”
“Here’s the problem. Cellulose is the structural part of the corn plant. Think of
it like the bones of a plant. It is strong and difficult to deconstruct. Sugar, the molecular
building blocks of biofuels, are locked within the cellulose.”
“Scientists at NREL used the Red Mesa Cluster to perform complex molecular dynamics modeling
and simulation involving billions of interactions at the atomic level. These simulations will
aid in engineering enzymes that will tease apart the cellulose and unlock the sugar.”
“A computational problem of this magnitude would take four to six months to run on an
average supercomputer.”
“But Red Sky with the Red Mesa cluster is no average supercomputer. It’s in the top
ten of the world’s fastest supercomputers running at an astonishing 433 teraflops, or,
433 trillion calculations per second.”
“With that level of speed, NREL was able to get results from its molecular modeling
and simulation run in just six weeks.”
Gregg Beckham: “Red Sky has really enabled us to do very, very large simulations that
would have taken on the order of 4 to 6 months on a typical supercomputer. Now we can do
them on the order of 4 to 6 weeks. It has enabled us to do very large scale molecular
dynamic simulations of cellulose de-crystallization and understand how the plant cell wall can
be deconstructed.”
“The challenge of developing better biofuels actually presents a companion challenge: designing
better engines to burn those biofuels. NREL is using the Red Mesa cluster to work on that
problem too.”
Brad Zigler: “At NREL we’re working to build kinetic models of advance fuel chemistry,
including biofuel so that other researchers will have a platform to study and evaluate
in an engine-based model to predict how the fuel will burn in an engine…”
“Red Sky will allow us to evaluate these kinetic models in a timescale of weeks rather
than months or even a year that our current system would take.”
“Creating new biofuels can be a tedious trial-and-error process involving chemical
interactions between enzymes and plant material.
Sometimes the product of a new formulation wouldn’t even fill a small pill bottle.
These tiny amounts of fuel can be optimized by first characterizing them on Red Mesa.”
“There are hundreds of chemical species and thousands of reactions in the combustion
of biofuels.”
“Red Mesa provides the ability to probe deeper into the chemistry and physics of combustion.”
“Comprehensive models of how these new fuels burn provide the foundation for better and
more efficient engines.”
“As work at NREL demonstrates, supercomputers are invaluable resources for discovering new
solutions to environmental problems.”
“But the obvious irony is that supercomputers can actually be environmental problems, sucking
up massive amounts of energy and water.”
“Not Red Sky. Every aspect of its implementation minimizes its environmental impact—from
the power distribution system that significantly reduces power leakage, to the energy efficient
processors. The deployment team even received recognition for recycling the packing material.”
“Red Sky features the Intel Xeon 5500 Series processor, an amazingly energy efficient multi-core
technology that intelligently maximizes performance to match workload.”
“Then there’s the matter of heat. Supercomputers generate a lot of it. The old paradigm of
supercomputer cooling was to chill the cavernous machine rooms to glacial temperatures.”
“In contrast, Red Sky uses a Glacier Door by Sun Microsystems, the first rack-mounted,
refrigerant-based passive cooling system on the market.”
“The Glacier Doors cool the components, removing 90% of the heat load.”
“This strategic cooling is further enhanced by feeding cool air through perforated tiles
to the first row of cabinets.
Cool air passes through the Glacier Doors from rack to rack by laminar flow. The air
exiting the last rack is actually cooler at the end of the flow than the beginning.”
“Besides saving energy, the Glacier Doors also save water, about 5 million gallons a
year, enough to fill nearly eight Olympic size swimming pools.
John Zepper: “Red Sky should really be called Green Sky. It’s the most energy efficient
high-performance system we’ve deployed to date.”
“However, being green is only one aspect of Red Sky ’s innovative design.”
“Red Sky is a commodity-based system, meaning it was built from off-the-shelf equipment.
However, a system with such a high level of innovation and complexity would not be possible
without extensive vendor cooperation.”
“For instance, Sandia and Sun Microsystems jointly designed the InfiniBand interconnect
switches that move data to and from external devices.”
“In fact, this was the very first InfiniBand-installation to use only optical interconnect cables.”
Rob Leland: “.. it’s very clear to me that we couldn’t have pulled this project
off without very, exceptionally close cooperation with the major vendors on the project…
Intel gave us very early access to the latest and greatest processor, the Nehalem processor…so
that we could design around it.
…And Sun had the very central role of bringing the whole system together and co-developing
the architecture with us.
“Red Sky is a capacity machine designed to run multiple jobs rather than full system
processing.”
“Like its predecessor Red Storm, Red Sky has a red black switch that physically separates
classified work from unclassified work.”
“That means the computer power of Red Sky can be a resource for a wide range of potential
users that need to solve big problems.”
“Users like the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that has its own dedicated Red
Mesa cluster.
Steve Hammond: “So Red Sky as a high performance computing provides us a ten-fold increase
in the computational capability we have at the lab right now.
That’s and invaluable capability for us in terms of advancing our ability to improve
the energy efficiency of wind turbines, to investigate novel materials to improve the
efficiency and lower the cost for solar photovolatiacs and biofuels.
“Next up for NREL is improving the blades of wind turbines to move more quietly and
efficiently as well as improved photo-voltaics and solar thermal electric storage.
These are not new technologies but they still need refinement to be economically practical.
“Sunset… At the end of one day, the sun provided more
energy than the Earth’s current population would consume in 27 years.”
“Sandia National Laboratories’ Red Sky Supercomputer with NREL’s Red Mesa Cluster
burned through an incomprehensible number of calculations.”
“Plants transformed the sun’s radiant energy into chemical energy.”
“And Red Sky transformed data into solutions.”