Eurotech, the Europe based computer manufacturer, keeps building their vision of energy efficient, green, and scalable high performance computing launching the latest addition to their supercomputer product line Aurora, the AuroraHPC 10-10.

With offices and branches all over the world, Eurotech is a publicly listed company (Milan stock exchange), with main business in embedded systems, cloud computing software and high performance computing.

Eurotech headquarters are set in a large alpine valley at the encounter of 2 rivers, where the beautiful Carnia County begins, in northeaster Italy. It is an amazing setting for the headquarters of one of the most important technology companies in Italy.

While it may seem unusual that somebody designs and engineers advanced HPC systems where the scenario looks more suitable for a peaceful holiday, it is also true that the Eurotech HPC division has quite an history in the supercomputing arena.

Eurotech supercomputing tradition

For more than 10 years Eurotech has designed and manufactured supercomputers as engineering partner of important research projects. Supercomputers like APE mille, APE Next, Janus are advanced machines that contributed to some advances in the HPC world.

For instance, the APE project was a precursor of the 3D torus, the idea of which is an intuition of the Italian INFN (national institute of nuclear physics), in parallel to a similar development in the USA. The APE machines set almost a paradigm and were utilized as reference in other parallel computation projects. The communication network built around the principle of nearest neighbour was the peculiarity for which the APE machines were first conceived.

Another milestone for Eurotech HPC division was the collaboration with Aurora Science, a scientific project supported by the Province of Trento (PAT), through the Bruno Kessler Foundation (FBK), and by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), enlisting also partners like  the University of Trento, Padua, the Provincial Agency of Protonterapia and the Edmund Mach Foundation.

Aurora Science and Eurotech, thanks also to the acquired experienced in major projects like Janus and QPACE, were able to finalize a supercomputer prototype which was designed to look into the exascale challenges.

Eurotech took charge of the evolution of the Aurora Science project into a commercial offering, giving birth to the Aurora range of supercomputers that are now available in the market. The HPC engineering team, a multicultural mix of Italians, Dutchmen, Germans and Japanese, designs the Aurora supercomputers that are then manufactured between the Eurotech Japanese branch, Advanet, and outsourcers in Italy, Austria and Germany.

The AuroraHPC 10-10

Back to the present, Eurotech has just launched the new AuroraHPC 10-10, the latest evolution of the Aurora generation of supercomputers toward an idea of energy efficient, green, dense, cost effective and scalable HPC.

The Intel Xeon E5 series (Sandy Bridge) based machine pushes the number of cores per rack to 4096, with a computational density is around 100 Tflops in 1.5 m2. This density is per se a contribution to better space management and cost savings.

As its predecessor, the AuroraHPC 10-10, is entirely liquid cooled, with permitted coolant temperature up to 50°C. The liquid is distributed through cold plates directly on the components where the heat is generated, allowing a very efficient heat extraction. This is the main reason why cooling in any climate zone is possible using heat exchangers, which cost and consume a fraction of chillers.

Liquid cooling has 2 important implications: energy cost savings and better reliability.

With cost of energy sky rocketing year after year, due to the rise in unit price per Kwh and the massive increase in Kw required by the data centers, controlling power consumption is becoming important to keep the budget going to activities that are more liked to organization goals.

The Aurora systems way of cooling through cold plates can reduce hot spots and avoids moving parts. The presence of three independent monitoring networks of sensors further contributes to better reliability of the system, which becomes more available during its lifespan.  

The new AuroraHPC 10-10 proposes the idea of the unified network architecture (UNA). That is the coexistence, in the same supercomputer, of an Infiniband network, an optional FPGA driven 3d Torus and 2 independent synchronization networks.

The AuroraHPC 10-10 has been studied to result in a better total cost of ownership: no air conditioning requirements, highly efficient power conversion, high density, synchronization networks, an optional switchless interconnection topology, high reliability are all factors that contribute to lower the total cost of ownership.

In addition, the latest product from Eurotech seems well set to withstand some of the future challenges that HPC will face in the coming years.

http://www.eurotech.com/en/hpc/