RSC, developer of supercomputers and advanced HPC systems based in Russia, today reported deployment of “the world’s first 100% ‘hot water’ liquid cooled supercomputer” at Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) located in Dubna, Moscow Region, Russia. The new system is reported to have peak performance of 500 teraflops (double precision), is named after Nikolay Nikolayevich Govorun, former director of JINR’s Computing and Automation Lab, and marks the 60th anniversary of commissioning of the first Ural-1 supercomputer at JINR in 1958.

RSC provided the following description of the system:

“Computing nodes of JINR system are based on Intel server products: powerful 72- core Intel Xeon Phi 7290 processors, Intel Xeon Scalable family processors (Intel Xeon Gold 6154), Intel Server Board S7200AP and Intel Server Board S2600BP, Intel SSD DC S3520 with SATA interface in M.2 form-factor and the newest high-speed Intel SSD DC P45xx drives NVMe interface and 1TB capacity.

“High-speed data transfer between JINR’s supercomputer nodes uses Intel Omni-Path Architecture communication technology providing up to 100 Gbps non-blocking switching rate. It is based on 48-port Intel Omni-Path Edge Switch 100 Series with 100% liquid cooling to provide high efficiency of the cooling system in ‘hot water’ mode and the lowest TCO of the system. Intel Omni-Path Architecture meets current requirements of resource-intensive user applications and provides sufficient throughput reserve for the future.”  The monitoring and management system uses RSC BasIS software stack

The RSC Tornado cabinets used in the new system feature high density and energy efficiency “precision liquid cooling balanced for continuous usage of high temperature cooling agent (up to +63°C at cabinet entry point). JINR’s specifications required optimal cabinet temperature mode with +45°C constant cooling agent temperature at node entries (+57°C peak temperature).”

RSC reports the average power efficiency factor (PUE) is less than 1.027 and that the system uses less than 3% of consumed power for cooling. The new systems will be used to study a variety of phenomena and, for example, “greatly accelerate simulation of collision dynamics of relativist heavy ions and provide new resources to study the properties of highly correlated systems in the physics of new materials. It will also be used to develop and adapt software for NICA mega-project for new computing architectures,” according to the release.

JINR has about 4,500 staff employees, including over 1,200 scientists. The inter-governmental scientific research organization encompasses seven laboratories (Theoretical Physical Laboratory; Nuclear Problems Laboratory; Nuclear Reactions Laboratory; High Energy Physics Laboratory; Neutron Physics Laboratory; Information Technology Laboratory, and Radiation Biology Laboratory) and 18 member countries (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Vietnam, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Cuba, Moldova, Mongolia, Poland, Russia, Romania, Slovakia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Czech Republic).