HPCwire: HP Announces Integrity-Based Supercomputer Finis Terrae

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June 13, 2008

HP Announces Integrity-Based Supercomputer Finis Terrae

GENEVA, June 13 -- HP today announced the successful deployment of one of the largest Intel Itanium-based shared memory supercomputers in the world. Finis Terrae offers an unparalleled high-performance computing (HPC) cluster that delivers the application performance, storage power and throughput needed to handle scientific, technological and research challenges at Spain's Supercomputing Centre of Galicia (CESGA).

The supercomputer is especially suited for the high-performance computing used in nanotechnology, life science, ocean science, HPC architectures and environmental studies, and is intended help researchers perform scientific and technical research with a specific focus on applications that require very large memory sizes.

HP, Intel and CESGA collaborated closely in the implementation of Finis Terrae.

HP's impact on European supercomputing

Finis Terrae is part of HP's commitment to supercomputing and to software tools that are engineered for maximum reliability and the high server density and compute power needed to execute high-performance calculations. HP will continue to provide technical training, maintenance, research and development projects, and support of a new reference centre to carry out scientific applications projects such as new compilers and math libraries, open source scientific applications, climatology and meteorology.

Other areas of importance will be the analysis and simulation of marine environments for the control of coast pollution, prevention of oil slicks, and studies on ocean currents, plankton and marine microbiology.

"Finis Terrae provides the highest levels of hardware and software availability and reliability," said Dr. Carlos Fernández, systems administration manager, CESGA. "This is due largely to HP's excellent standards of technical support that ensure that we can keep providing first-class service to our users at all times."

Demonstrating advanced and integrated innovation, Finis Terrae completed 350,000 calculation hours, equivalent to 40 years in real time during a two-week benchmarking test. This process utilized only half of the supercomputer capacity, extracting 70 million pieces of data and conclusions that can now be used in research for crystallography and geotechnical engineering.

"At CESGA, we are contributing to the future of supercomputing in collaboration with HP, Intel and the research community of Galicia and CSIC [Spanish Council of Scientific Research]," explained Ignacio Lopez, technical director, CESGA. "With the Galician universities, CSIC scientific community and other academic entities in Spain having access to Finis Terrae, the execution of high-performance calculation tasks delivering on quick analyses and valuable scientific results will contribute to the society's well-being."

Unique supercomputing technology

Designed to provide precise analysis and simulations, Finis Terrae offers superior performance and large physical memory with:

A cluster of 142 nodes with 16 Intel Itanium 2 processor cores each of HP Integrity rx7640 combined with HP Integrity Superdome servers with 1.3 terabytes (TB) of main memory. The rx7640 nodes are based on a 16-way shared memory architecture with scalable memory bandwidth and provide an accumulated shared memory space of 19 TB.
An Infiniband high-performance interconnection network between all nodes including the Superdome systems.
Advanced fiber optics that can reach a data transmission speed of 20 gigabits per second at distances of up to 100 metres.
Hierarchical storage system of 390 TB on disc and 1 petabyte on robotic tape libraries, the largest in Spain.

Additionally, Finis Terrae weighs 33.5 tons and occupies approximately 140 square metres of floor space.

About Finis Terrae

Finis Terrae is a Latin phrase meaning "the end of the earth." In the times of the Romans, finis terrae was considered to be at the farthest edge of the northwesterly land mass in Iberia. Finisterre, a famous Spanish fishing port today, is situated midway between the upper and lower bays of Galicia and is approximately a one-hour drive from Santiago de Compostela. CESGA has borrowed the name for its high-performance computing cluster.

About CESGA

The Supercomputing Centre of Galicia (CESGA) is a centre par excellence in research and high-performance computing services. Since 1993, it has been the centre for scientific computing, high-performance communications and advanced services for the Galician Scientific Community and the Spanish Council of Scientific Research (CSIC). CESGA is an institution owned by the Xunta de Galicia and CSIC, whose mission is to promote, diffuse and provide intensive calculation services and communications to the Galician and CSIC research communities, as well as to other companies or institutions that request usage and, in this way, to contribute via technologic improvement and innovation to the improvement of company competitiveness. More information is available at www.cesga.es.

About Intel

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), the world leader in silicon innovation, develops technologies, products and initiatives to continually advance how people work and live. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom and http://blogs.intel.com.

About HP

HP focuses on simplifying technology experiences for all of its customers -- from individual consumers to the largest businesses. With a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure, HP is among the world's largest IT companies, with revenue totaling $110.4 billion for the four fiscal quarters ended April 30, 2008. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at www.hp.com.

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Source: Hewlett-Packard

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