The Russians are Coming: RSC in TOP10 of TOP500 Vendors

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

imgresThis week Russian supercomputing vendor RSC Group announced that the company is now a TOP10 supercomputing vendor according to the current edition of the Top500 list. In fact, RSC is the only Russian developer and manufacturer of HPC systems in the leading group of the rating by the number of deployed supercomputers. After doubling its presence in the Top500 list to four systems, RSC Group holds the 9th place among the world leading supercomputer vendors.

For the first time, the Top500 list (November, 2014) contains two systems developed by RSC for one of the most innovative and the most powerful supercomputing centers in Russia at the St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University (SPbSPU). Polytechnic RSC Tornado made the first hundred of the Top500 taking 81st place with LINPACK performance of 658 Teraflops. New SPbSPU supercomputing cluster based on the RSC Tornado architecture with direct liquid cooling has the peak performance of 829 Teraflops. It is the first project in Russia and CIS based on the newest Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 server processors.

The Polytechnic RSC Tornado includes 712 dual-processor nodes containing 1424 high-performance Intel Xeon E5-2697 v3 server processors (14 cores, 2.6 GHz frequency each), Intel S2600KP and Intel S2600WT server boards for this processor generation, and the latest Intel SSD DC S3500 solid state drives for corporate data centers. These HPC resources will be used not only to solve relevant scientific tasks but also for cloud, VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and graphical services.

The second part of the new hybrid HPC resources contains a unique high-density massively parallel RSC PetaStream system with direct liquid cooling and total performance of 258 Teraflops. Polytechnic RSC PetaStream supercomputer has demonstrated LINPACK performance of 170.5 Teraflops taking 390th position in the current edition of the Top500 list. This SPbSPU supercomputing system developed and produced by RSC specialists in Russia is based on 60-core Intel Xeon Phi 5120D and Intel Xeon E5-2600 v2 family processors with Intel server boards and Intel SSD DC S3500 solid-state drives for enterprise data centers.

A unique feature of RSC PetaStream is the massively parallel architecture based on Intel Xeon Phi enabling execution of up to 250,000 parallel threads on 1024 computing nodes based on x86 architecture in a single cabinet taking just 1 sq.m. The RSC PetaStream massively parallel architecture holds the world records of computing and power density as well as by compactness. RSC PetaStream implements an innovative subsystem based on the leading industry standard of 400V DC power developed in cooperation with Emerson Electric. This subsystem enables power distribution efficiency over 90% improving overall energy efficiency of the system, reduction of operating costs and overall reliability of the complex.

Additional Notes:

  • Total peak performance of the new SPbSPU supercomputing center after its commissioning planned for 2015 will exceed 1.1 Petaflops.
  • The current Top500 list also includes two RSC systems based on liquid-cooled RSC Tornado cluster architecture, Intel Xeon server processors, Intel server boards and Intel SSDs.
  • The 133th position of the rating is held by MVS-10P supercomputer with peak performance of 523 Teraflops that has been deployed two years ago at the Joint Supercomputer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (JSCC RAS).
  • The 190th position in the Top500 list is taken by the RSC Tornado SUSU computing cluster with 473 Teraflops peak performance that has been running in South Ural State University (SUSU) in Chelyabinsk since 2009.
  • In Russia, RSC is the leader with 44% share among all Russian supercomputers in the TOP500. Total peak performance of RSC systems in the Top500 list has exceeded 2 Petaflops and the current list includes 9 supercomputers from Russia.

Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter.