HPCwire: Galicia To Install Large Memory Supercomputer

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Features

April 14, 2006

Galicia To Install Large Memory Supercomputer

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

At an event attended by Spanish national and Galician authorities in the Supercomputing Center of Galicia (Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia - CESGA), CESGA, HP and Intel have announced a collaboration with Xunta de Galicia and the Higher Council of Scientific Research (CSIC) to install the largest memory-shared supercomputer in Europe by mid 2007. The new supercomputer, called Finis Terrae, will be based in the supercomputing center located in Santiago de Compostela. With it, Spanish and particularly Galician researchers will be able to perform more complex research projects than previously possible, with the new supercomputer providing enough computing and storage capacity to respond to the most ambitious scientific challenges.

Finis Terrae will be a worldwide reference point for scientific and technical computing and will benefit e-Science initiatives both in Spain and all across Europe, through existing collaborations with international external research groups. Finis Terrae will also reduce the execution time of current applications and overcome performance challenges currently faced in Spain when managing HPC projects.

"The existence of important groups of researchers among CESGA and CSIC users in Galicia make this community an ideal option for the implementation of this supercomputer," explained Javier García Tobio, Director of GESGA. "Thanks to Finis Terrae, CESGA is becoming a reference center at a European and worldwide level, supplying high level computing technology with which the international scientific community will be able to conduct important research projects".

The decision to set up a reference center responds directly to advancements in R&D by research groups from universities in Galicia and the CSIC in the area of high performance computing. The three partners in this collaboration have a common interest in developing projects in the following areas: design, development and optimization of scientific applications and specific software for shared memory systems; design and enhancement of new computing architectures as well as adaptation and optimization of free-software based scientific applications into shared memory. Also, the reference center will participate in conducting benchmarks of applications and beta tests of new developments.

As a direct result of this collaboration agreement, the Finis Terrae high performance supercomputer will be installed in CESGA, with more than 2,500 leading edge Intel Itanium 2 processor cores. This exceptional infrastructure, dedicated to R&D, has a shared memory architecture of more than 19 TB and a high performance InfiniBand network. The supercomputer will work with code based on free software (Linux, Lustre, Globus) and will have a hierarchical disk storage of 390 TB and a one petabyte automated tape library.

Finis Terrae will run on 142 nodes of 16 Itanium 2 processor cores with 128 GB of memory each. It will also include two nodes of 128 processor cores each (one with 384 GB of memory and the other with 1,024 GB). The Intel Itanium 2 processors that will be installed will be from the latest generation of the Itanium 2 family, designed to satisfy scientists' and researchers' needs, thanks to excellent performance in floating point operations, powerful memory bandwidth and high volume data management. The supercomputer will occupy 140 square meters and weigh 33.500 Kg.

For Jesús Maximoff, General Manager of Intel Corporation Iberia Finis Terrea is driving supercomputing capacity in Spain as an essential tool for innovation, and is a leap ahead for Intel in the research carried out in the country.

"We are proud that Galicia, through the CESGA researchers, has opened doors for us to be integrated into a worldwide network of research centres that are present in more than 20 countries. It will also become the biggest infrastructure for numerical simulation available in Spain to researchers from CSIC," said Maximoff.

The value of the equipment exceeds 60 million euros, and each of the partners in the collaboration agreement will supply part of this cost. The contributions from CESGA will be in infrastructure, operation and management, first level maintenance, and coordination of R&D projects. Intel collaborates in the project with processors, software tools, R&D projects, training, and a reference center. Finally, HP will provide the supercomputer, its maintenance, software tools, training, R&D projects and a reference center.

According to Salustiano Mato, President of CESGA and general manager of R&D; "The creation of the collaboration agreement announced today provides possibilities and opportunities that will very positively influence the incorporation of the competitive differentiating elements of our companies and institutions into a sustainable development framework that benefits social welfare. We are not therefore talking of the purchase of a supercomputer, but of a long-term collaboration in which the partners work together to complete research activities and training that promote the creation of projects that benefit society as a whole."

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Top Headlines

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Tailoring Medicine with Supercomputers

Mar 16 | Bio-IT World | Biotech firm builds genetic models from patient data. Read more...

Gelsinger Stuns Analysts and Colleagues with Storage Pool Plan

Mar 15 | The Register | EMC's grand vision for unified global storage. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html