HPCwire: STFC Daresbury Laboratory to Use Streamline Computing Cluster

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

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

March 30, 2009

STFC Daresbury Laboratory to Use Streamline Computing Cluster

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

WARWICK, England, March 30 -- The new computing cluster at the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council's Daresbury Laboratory will incorporate the latest Intel QuickPath Nehalem nodes from Supermicro and NVIDIA Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs) as a fully integrated solution provided by Streamline Computing.

Jonathan Follows, team leader of the Distributed Computing Group (DisCo) at Daresbury Laboratory, said, "We look forward to working with all of the partners in this program and thank Streamline Computing for implementing this system within a very tight timescale to meet STFC requirements."

Daresbury Laboratory is planning for the Hartree Centre which will address "grand challenge" science delivered through high performance computing, to be implemented in 2011. One significant part of this is expected to be delivered using GPU computing and this latest cluster represents a collaborative programme between Daresbury, Streamline and NVIDIA to explore the possibilities of this technology.

Technical specialists from NVIDIA and Streamline Computing will work together to ensure that the cluster runs to maximum efficiency but some early research from Streamline Computing has already demonstrated 10 fold speedups in CUBLAS and CUFFT libraries. Further collaborations may also be possible with software tool and compiler companies to test new tools for GPU computing.

"We very much welcome the opportunity to continue to work with the excellent technical team at STFC Daresbury Laboratory and together enhance the skills and experience of Streamline engineers allowing us to continue to deliver best of breed high performance computing clusters making the best use of commodity technology," said Dr John Taylor, CTO of Streamline Computing. "The combination of Nehalem and Tesla are reaching new plateaux in commodity performance and the solution at Daresbury will provide a major research platform for scientific computing."

There are some important advances in technology and systems design incorporated within the new cluster, including:

Intel Nehalem based nodes with higher I/O and memory bandwidth and QuickPath Interconnect.
Dual socket nodes now supporting multiple NVIDIA Tesla cards via a dual PCI-E (16) Gen 2 provided by Supermicro.
Each resilient node supports a complete Tesla S1070 1U server chassis with 4 X 1.29GHz Tesla cards.
Streamline Computing solution containing a CUDA ready software stack installed on the system complete with pre-installed tools and libraries so the research team at Daresbury can utilise the cluster from day one after installation.
The whole solution is managed through a concurrentCOMMAND cluster management appliance from Concurrent Thinking Ltd.

The cluster has been designed to show how effective GPU computing can be for many classes of application but linked with Nehalem they also allow Daresbury to ensure the minimum of bottlenecks when connecting GPUs through Infiniband in each node to high performance storage systems. This additional cluster enhances a facility installed in the previous year which utilised Harpertown and Seaburg based nodes with the then fastest IB solution with DDR and PCI-E Gen 2 connect X cards from Mellanox.

Streamline Computing are particularly grateful to Supermicro for early release server products which demonstrate Nehalem performance in practical and reliable server solutions. General Manager of Supermicro in Europe, Dev Tyagi, said, "Supermicro has an excellent track record for quickly implementing new technologies from companies like Intel to provide early adopters and pre-release customers timely access to next-generation server products. The company's ability to rapidly innovate and bring creative server solutions to the market has enabled Supermicro to provide high-density Twin servers and motherboards with the fastest possible PCI-Express (16) Gen 2 interface to facilitate a maximum bandwidth Tesla server."

"There has been much discussion about the promise of GPU computing," said Andy Keane, general manager of GPU Computing for NVIDIA. "This project will demonstrate that Tesla and the CUDA architecture have made the promise a reality. Daresbury is tackling some of the most fundamental scientific questions and we're confident that our work with the Laboratory and Streamline Computing will play a significant role in answering these challenges."

About Streamline Computing

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

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

TACC's Ranger supercomputer celebrates its second year of enabling important research; Microsoft partners with NSF to bring cloud services to researchers; and NSF submits its fiscal year 2011 budget request. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

NASA Looks to Move Science Apps Into the Cloud

It seems only natural that the US space agency would be casting its eyes toward the clouds. Sure enough, NASA is now looking to cloud computing to optimize the operation of the agency's IT infrastructure for some of its science codes. Like many commercial businesses and government organizations, NASA is being asked to do more computing with fewer datacenter resources.
Read More...

Thoughts, Observations, Beliefs & Opinions About the NSF Supercomputer Centers

There is no such thing as an NSF (Supercomputer) Center and there never has been. There should be. What there are, in the words of Ed Hayes, then comptroller of NSF, are "NSF ASSISTED Supercomputer Centers." This is a double edged sword.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

IBM Releases Energy Efficient Power7 System

Feb 09 | eWeek Europe | Company says new high-end servers will deliver "intelligent performance." Read more...

Inductive Coupling Packs Flash Drive in a Chip

Feb 09 | EE Times | Wireless technology promises energy-efficient chip-to-chip communication. Read more...

IBM, Microsoft Help Create Montana Supercomputer

Feb 08 | eWeek | A new kind of Rocky Mountain high. Read more...

AMD Aims for GPUs in Mainstream Servers Starting 2012

Feb 08 | Computerworld | Chip maker hopes to bring CPU-GPU processors to servers in two years. Read more...

Graphene Transistors That Work at Blistering Speeds

Feb 05 | Technology Review | IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. 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.

Appro Assists LLNL with Cluster Designed for Extreme Scale Visualization

Jan 11 | | LLNL is home to some of the fastest computers in the world. In 2012, LLNL expects to have the Sequoia supercomputing cluster operational with a projected performance of over 20 PFLOP/s. These systems will focus on strengthening the foundations of predictive simulation through running large suites of complex simulations and then comparing model predictions with experimental data. To visualize this project’s large amount of data, LLNL requested an Appro Supercomputing Cluster specifically designed to support interactive data analysis.

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