January 31, 2013
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 31 – Italy's "Eurora" supercomputer -- which uses NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators based on NVIDIA Kepler, the world's fastest and most efficient high performance computing (HPC) architecture -- has set a new record for data center energy efficiency, NVIDIA today announced.
The Eurora supercomputer, built by Eurotech and deployed Wednesday at the Cineca facility in Bologna, Italy, the country's most powerful supercomputing center, reached 3,150 megaflops per watt of sustained performance -- a mark 26 percent higher than the top system on the most recent Green500 list of the world's most efficient supercomputers.
Eurora broke the record by combining 128 high-performance, energy-efficient NVIDIA Tesla K20 accelerators with the Eurotech Aurora Tigon supercomputer, featuring innovative Aurora Hot Water Cooling technology, which uses direct hot water cooling on all electronic and electrical components of the HPC system.
Available to members of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) and major Italian research entities, Eurora will enable scientists to advance research and discovery across a range of scientific disciplines, including material science, astrophysics, life sciences and Earth sciences.
"Advanced computer simulations that enable scientists to discover new phenomena and test hypotheses require massive amounts of performance, which can consume a lot of power," said Sanzio Bassini, director of HPC department at Cineca. "Equipped with the ultra-efficient Aurora system and NVIDIA GPU accelerators, Eurora will give European researchers the computing muscle to study all types of physical and biological systems, while allowing us to keep data center power consumption and costs in check."
Pairing NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPUs with Eurotech's Aurora Hot Water Cooling technology, the Eurora system is more efficient and compact than conventional air-cooled solutions. HPC systems based on the Eurora hardware architecture, including the Eurotech Aurora Tigon, enable data centers to potentially reduce energy bills by up to 50 percent and reduce total cost of ownership by 30-50 percent.
In addition, the use of Aurora Hot Water Cooling technology reduces or eliminates the need for air conditioning in typically warm climates like Italy. The thermal energy the system produces can be used to heat buildings, drive adsorption chillers for air conditioning or generate tri-generation, the combined production of electricity, heating and cooling.
"GPU accelerators are inherently more energy efficient than CPUs, and Tesla K20 accelerators widen this gap considerably," said Sumit Gupta, general manger of the Tesla accelerated computing business at NVIDIA. "Energy efficiency has become the defining element of computing performance. And GPUs enable data center computer systems of all sizes -- from small clusters to future exascale-class systems -- to achieve performance goals within an economically feasible energy budget."
Eurora is a prototype system developed for Cineca under the PRACE 2IP initiative to provide a sustainable, high-quality infrastructure to meet the most demanding needs of the European HPC user community. A commercial version of the Eurotech Aurora Tigon supercomputer is also available today from Eurotech. More information is available on the Eurotech website.
About NVIDIA Tesla GPUs
NVIDIA Tesla GPUs are massively parallel accelerators based on the NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing platform and programming model. Tesla GPUs are designed from the ground up for power-efficient, high performance computing, computational science and supercomputing, delivering dramatically higher application acceleration for a range of scientific and commercial applications than a CPU-only approach.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA awakened the world to computer graphics when it invented the GPU in 1999. Today, its processors power a broad range of products from smartphones to supercomputers. NVIDIA's mobile processors are used in cell phones, tablets and auto infotainment systems. PC gamers rely on GPUs to enjoy spectacularly immersive worlds. Professionals use them to create 3D graphics and visual effects in movies and to design everything from golf clubs to jumbo jets. And researchers utilize GPUs to advance the frontiers of science with high performance computing. The company has more than 5,000 patents issued, allowed or filed, including ones covering ideas essential to modern computing.
-----
Source: NVIDIA
The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
Read more...
Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences.
Read more...
Supercomputing veteran, Bo Ewald, has been neck-deep in bleeding edge system development since his twelve-year stint at Cray Research back in the mid-1980s, which was followed by his tenure at large organizations like SGI and startups, including Scale Eight Corporation and Linux Networx. He has put his weight behind quantum company....
Read more...
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...
May 10, 2013 |
Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
Read more...
May 09, 2013 |
The Japanese government has revealed its plans to best its previous K Computer efforts with what they hope will be the first exascale system...
Read more...
May 08, 2013 |
For engineers looking to leverage high-performance computing, the accessibility of a cloud-based approach is a powerful draw, but there are costs that may not be readily apparent.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.