New HPC System Installed at HLRS

December 1, 2014

BERLIN, Germany, Dec. 1 — The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) announced that its member centre High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) successfully completed the installation of HPC system “Hornet.” The new HLRS supercomputer, a CRAY XC40 system which delivers a peak performance of 3.8 PetaFlops, has been declared fully operational and will be available for its scientific and industrial usership as of immediately.

HLRS’s new Cray XC40 system is based on the new Intel Xeon processors, formerly code-named “Haswell,” and the Cray Aries system interconnect. In its current configuration state, Hornet consists of 21 cabinets hosting 3,944 compute nodes, which sums up to a total of 94,656 compute cores. The system’s main memory capacity is 493 Terabyte. Users will specifically benefit from the now quadrupled storage space the HLRS supercomputing infrastructure provides: 5.4 Petabyte of file storage with an Input/Output speed in the range of 150GB/s are available to meet the performance challenges of today’s most demanding HPC users, which come from a wealth of fields ranging from the automotive and aerospace research and industries to medicine and life sciences, astrophysics and geophysics, amongst others.

Hornet is the successor of HLRS’s previous flagship computer Hermit, which after about three years in service is gradually been taken out of operation. The system replacement went according to the earlier agreed HPC system roadmap as defined by GCS. “HPC systems have become an indispensable tool to achieve breakthrough discoveries and innovations. With Hornet, we have taken the next step for HLRS to enable world-class research,“ states Professor Dr. Ing. Michael M. Resch, Director of HLRS. “It is very important for us that we are now in a position to offer state-of-the-art HPC technology also to our industrial users. Together with our simulation expertise the extended simulation capacities and capabilities of Hornet provide our scientific and industrial users in Germany and Europe with perfect means to continue enabling innovation and quality of the highest degree.”

More Power Output – Less Power Consumption

HLRS’s new high-end HPC system delivers significantly increased computing power – it outperforms Hermit both in peak as in sustained performance by a factor of about 4 – while at the same time excelling in drastically reduced power consumption. In combination with the at HLRS installed energy-efficient cooling system, an optimal cost-of-ownership is achieved which furthers the national HPC centre’s aspirations to be a model example in the area of energy efficiency and sustainability.

Hornet: HPCG-Benchmark

Delivering proof that their HPC clientele enjoys top priority, HLRS underwent all necessary efforts to deliver data for a new kind of benchmark, which from the user’s perspective is of high significance: the HPCG benchmark (High Performance Conjugate Gradient). This new benchmark, which debuted at ISC’14 in Leipzig in June of this year, does not just concentrate on raw CPU performance but stresses the system balance, e. g. floating point and communication bandwidth and latency, and it tightens the focus on messaging, memory, and parallelization—parameters that add up to an “averaged” system performance which is especially from the users’ point of view more beneficial and more important. Hornet delivered about 40 TFlops in this test.

Outlook

Following its ambitious technology roadmap, HLRS will extend Hornet in 2015 with 20 additional cabinets, boosting the system’s expected peak performance to then over 7 PetaFlops.

About HLRS

The High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) of the University of Stuttgart is one of the three German supercomputer institutions forming the national Gauss Centre for Supercomputing. HLRS supports German and pan-European researchers as well as industrial users with leading-edge supercomputing technology. It’s new Cray XC40 system (“Hornet”) complements the system architectures provided by the other two GCS member centres Leibniz Supercomputing Centre Garching/Munich (LRZ), which runs a System X iDataPlex from IBM (“SuperMUC”), and Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), which hosts an IBM BlueGene/Q system nick-named JUQUEEN.

About GCS

The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) combines the three national supercomputing centres HLRS (High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart), JSC (Jülich Supercomputing Centre), and LRZ (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching near Munich) into Germany’s Tier-0 supercomputing institution. Concertedly, the three centres provide the largest and most powerful supercomputing infrastructure in all of Europe to serve a wide range of industrial and research activities in various disciplines. They also provide top-class training and education for the national as well as the European High Performance Computing (HPC) community. GCS is the German member of PRACE (Partnership for Advance Computing in Europe), an international non- profit association consisting of 25 member countries, whose representative organizations create a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, providing access to computing and data management resources and services for large-scale scientific and engineering applications at the highest performance level.

Source: Gauss Centre for Supercomputing

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