STFC Daresbury Laboratory's new Tesla, Nehalem combo cluster

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

More news from the UK’s Streamline Computing, this time about a new system to be installed at the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Daresbury Laboratory. This system is interesting in that it uses the new Xeon 5500’s (Nehalem-EP) and the QuickPath Interconnect along side NVIDIA’s Tesla graphics cards.

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.

…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.

The release isn’t up at the company’s site just yet, but you can find it at HPCwire.