Entries filed under “New Installations”

ClusterVision has announced the successful completion of a new cluster installation project at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). With cluster design, build and service projects already completed at the Université Catholique de Louvain, and the Université de Liège, the new installation at the Université Libre de Bruxelles continues ClusterVision’s recent history of engagement with universities in the Wallonia region, and also its successful partnership with Dell and others.

The new CÉCI cluster to be installed at the ULB had to feature a very high number of cores interconnected with an InfiniBand network and with a well-balanced storage system to allow fast IO response to the CPU load while enabling high capacity expansions,” said Raphael Leplae ULB, Computing Centre, operations/HPC manager. “ClusterVision proposed a unique combination of hardware and software components matching exactly our needs. This new cluster installation will enable researchers requiring HPC solutions, such as earth-level simulations, bioinformatics and other big data-related analysis, to move towards more ambitious projects and/or be more competitive at the international level.”

ClusterVision worked with system engineers at ULB to design and install a combination of HPC technologies from partners including Dell, Supermicro, AMD, Nvidia, Qlogic, GPFS, and Bright Computing. The compute density and performance characteristics are achieved through the addition of 42 Dell PowerEdge M915 Blade Servers, each with four AMD Opteron 6272 CPUs and 256GB of RAM. Selecting the AMD Opteron 6200 series ‘Interlagos’ 16-core processors allowed engineers at ClusterVision to achieve the scaled performance but keeping within the requirements for density and energy efficiency. Additional compute power is provided by two Nvidia Tesla M2090 GPUs, housed in a Supermicro chassis, also with AMD Opteron 6200 processors.

The system incorporates both high- and mid-range storage expansion based on Dell PowerVault. High-range storage is expanded by Dell PowerVault MD3220 with 24x 900GB SAS 10K RPM. The mid-range storage expansion of 40TB is achieved via one Dell PowerVault MD3200 and two Dell PowerVault MD1200 units. Network connectivity is primarily provided by Qlogic Infinipath QLE7340 and Qlogic QLA12200 switches.

To complete the system, ClusterVision included a full software environment, including IBM’s high performance shared file system, GPFS (General Parallel File System) – an innovative solution for non-IBM storage, and Advanced Version licences of Bright Cluster Manager from Bright Computing. Bright Cluster Manager was used for the installed Linux environment, initial provisioning and configuration of the cluster components and is also the base platform for the day-to-day operational management of the system.

This story appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

Today Cray announced that the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) has put one of the world’s fastest supercomputers solely dedicated to astronomy into production. The new Cray XC30 supercomputer runs complex simulations — experiments that they hope will one day answer longstanding questions, such as the formation of galaxies and the origin of the solar system.

A reliable, powerful supercomputer is a vital resource for our researchers and engineers, and we are pleased that the Cray XC30 supercomputer is giving our users the computational tools they need for the effective reproduction and study of astronomical phenomena,” said Eiichiro Kokubo, director of NAOJ’s Center for Computational Astrophysics (CfCA). “Performing astronomical experiments in a laboratory setting is difficult, but our new Cray XC30 supercomputer is allowing us to perform the advanced numerical simulations that are crucial to our research.”

Nicknamed “ATERUI,” the eight-cabinet Cray XC30 supercomputer has a peak performance of more than 500 teraflops and is located at NAOJ’s Mizusawa VLBI Observatory in Iwate, Japan. Read the Full Story.

Fujitsu has received an order from Nagoya University’s Information Technology Center for a high-performance supercomputer for academic research.

The system will have a hybrid configuration, composed of a Fujitsu supercomputer PrimeHPC FX10 and an HPC cluster comprised of Fujitsu Server PrimeRGY CX400. At deployment, it will have a theoretical peak performance of 561.4 teraflops, and will be scaled up in the future to 3,662.5 teraflops, making it one of the biggest systems in Japan and the largest in the Tokai region where Nagoya is situated.

The new system is due to start running from October 2013 and will be used for advanced research and academic purposes at Nagoya University’s Information Technology Center.

Nagoya University, the largest national university in the Tokai region and a center of academics and research there, is home to the Information Technology Center, a shared resource for universities and researchers conducting academic research throughout Japan. Since December 1981, numerous researchers have used the mainframe computers and supercomputers deployed there, mostly for work on science and technology.

The new system consolidates the Information Technology Center’s three existing systems: the supercomputer system, application server, and information-academics platform. It was designed to meet demands for more computing capacity, to make computing resources in other academic areas, to create new computational services, and to help educate people who will reach into new areas of inquiry.

This story appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

This week IBM announced that the Philippine government has chosen an IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer to support R&D projects focused on reducing poverty, improving government processes, and enabling smarter weather management.

The IBM Blue Gene supercomputer will be most applicable to DOST’s major programs such as NOAH and Smart Agriculture, “said DOST Secretary Mario G. Montejo. “First we will work toward Blue Gene’s integration to Project NOAH to provide more advanced seven-day local weather forecasts. We can also use it to run various weather models and validate the accuracy of results almost real-time.”

Read the Full Story.

This week the University of Florida unveiled HiPerGator, the state’s most powerful supercomputer with 157 Teraflops of peak performance.

UF worked with Dell, Terascala, Mellanox and AMD to build a machine that makes supercomputing power available to all UF faculty and their collaborators and spreads HiPerGator’s computing power over multiple simultaneous jobs instead of focused on a single task at warp speed. HiPerGator features the latest in high-performance computing technology from Dell and AMD with 16,384 processing cores; a Dell Terascala HPC Storage Solution (DT-HSS 4.5) with the industry’s fastest open-source parallel file system; and Mellanox’s FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand interconnects that provide the highest bandwidth and lowest latency. Together these features provide UF researchers unprecedented computation and faster access to data to quickly further their research.

Read the Full Story or check out the Fact Sheet on HiPerGator.