Kraken: The First Academic Petaflop Computer
Mark R. Fahey, Lonnie D. Crosby, Gary L. Rogers, Victor Hazlewood · 2017
Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS) proposed to deploy a 1-petaflop (PF) peak performance Cray XT5 system later named Kraken. This chapter describes the program background, timelines, upgrades, integration activities, acceptance testing, and a system overview of Kraken. Kraken is a series of Cray XT systems that culminated in a 112,896-core XT5 system that has 147 TB of memory and 2.4 PB of dedicated formatted disk space. The Cray XT operating system, Cray Linux Environment (CLE), is a distributed system of service-node and compute-node components. The management tools that power Cray XT systems help ease the task of administering large supercomputers. Kraken has access to three major storage resources. These include a Network File System (NFS), Lustre filesystem, and High Performance Storage System (HPSS). Kraken&s;s archival data system is HPSS which is developed and operated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory&s;s (ORNL) National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS).