HPCwire: CSC Supercomputer Upgraded, Part of PRACE Project

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November 18, 2008

CSC Supercomputer Upgraded, Part of PRACE Project

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Nov. 18 -- The Finnish IT Center for Science, CSC, has updated its supercomputer again. The Cray XT4/XT5 supercomputer has been upgraded with two new Cray XT5 cabinets. The new Cray XT5 cabinets are part of the PRACE project (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe). PRACE selected a broad coverage of promising architectures for petaflop/s-class systems to be deployed in 2009/2010. PRACE is a project funded in part by the EU's 7th Framework Programme.

PRACE will create a persistent pan-European high performance computing (HPC) service and infrastructure. The service will comprise three to five petaflop/s-class HPC centers. In computing, flop/s is an acronym meaning FLoating point OPerations per Second. The flop/s is a measure of a computer's performance. One petaflop/s means computer performance of 10 power 15 flop/s (1 000 000 000 000 000 flop/s per second). This computer performance is roughly equal to 50,000 of today's laptops' performance.

The pan-European HPC service will be a part of the European Research Area, in which the Seventh Framework Programme is prepared to invest hundreds of millions of Euros.

PRACE selected a broad coverage of promising architectures for six different prototypes. The new Cray XT5 system is one of the prototypes. CSC's prototype is a joint-prototype with CSCS (Swiss National Supercomputer Center) -- the machine is installed to CSC.
The two Cray XT5 cabinets and CSC's recently upgraded Cray XT4/XT5 system have in total 10864 computer cores and they create together a theoretical peak performance of 100 teraflop/s. This makes the new Cray XT5 system at CSC the most powerful academic supercomputer in the Nordic countries and one of the fastest supercomputers in Europe.

"The PRACE upgrade confirms CSC's strong position and influence in building European co-operation," says Kimmo Koski, managing director of CSC. "This powerful resource strengthens Finland's position as an attractive environment for world-class research."

16 European nations are part of PRACE. The five other prototypes will be installed at the following PRACE partner sites:

BSC (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain), installs a hybrid prototype combining IBM Cell and Power6 processors. The Cell processors are used for computation and the Power6 processors for service.

CEA (French Atomic Energy Commission, France) and FZJ (Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany) jointly use Intel Nehalem/Xeon processors in their systems. Two shared-memory multiprocessors (thin node clusters) will be distributed over the two sites; a prototype produced by BULL at CEA and a larger system of the same architecture at FZJ.

FZJ provides its already-installed IBM BlueGene/P system as a Massively Parallel Processing prototype.

HLRS (High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart, Germany) offers a NEC SX-9 and an x86 based cluster as a hybrid prototype.

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