Entries filed under “New Installations”

New installations of high performance computing hardware.

SGI to Provide Total Solution

By Staff | Published February 19, 2013

Technical computing provider SGI has announced that Total has selected it to provide a high-performance computing solution capable of delivering compute power of 2.3 petaflops per second.

The system will use the latest generation of SGI ICE X servers, and greatly increases the data processing power previously available to Total at its Jean Féger Scientific and Technical Centre (CSTJF) in Pau, southwest France.

The aim of the new system is to help Total in the quest to identify and develop new oil and gas prospects.

The needs for compute-intensive data processing in the oil and gas industry are constantly increasing,’ said SGI interim CEO Ron Verdoorn. “With data files exceeding 10 petabytes, technological innovation for reservoir modelling and simulation relies not only on compute architectures but also on storage architectures, as well. Within this framework, SGI offers a complete integrated solution including compute, storage, and services.”

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


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Météo France Upgrades Bull Supercomputer with Allinea DDT and Allinea MAP

By Ralph | Published February 18, 2013

Today Allinea announced that Bull will install two 500-teraflop supercomputers with the company’s software at the Météo-France center in Toulouse. By 2016, the systems will be further upgraded for a computing capability of more than 5 PetaFlops.

One major challenge of this upgrade is porting applications to work smoothly on the new computers. To ease this problem, Bull selected Allinea DDT debugging tools and Allinea MAP, an MPI profiler designed for ease of use.

Météo-France users will benefit from using these two products to debug, profile, and optimize applications, which is a big improvement that will lead to more efficient codes running on the supercomputers,” said Olivier David, Alliances Director at Bull. “The time you don’t spend on debugging, you can be running the application to get scientific results. At the end of the day, you just want to focus on science and that’s why we need Allinea Software.”

Both Allinea DDT and Allinea MAP have been fully integrated in the bullx supercomputer software suite powering the bullx supercomputers, and developers will need only minimal training before they can start spotting bottlenecks and the lines of code that slow down their applications. Read the Full Story.

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Haise Supercomputer Dedicated in Mississippi

By RichB | Published February 18, 2013

Haise, one of the DoD’s newest supercomputers, was dedicated this weekend at the Navy DSRC in Mississippi. Named after Navy aviator and NASA astronaut Fred Haise, the IBM iDataPlex supercomputer will be used to design new aircraft, ships, and military equipment as well as model and simulate weather and ocean conditions for a wide range of other DoD mission-related science and engineering research. The Navy DSRC is a part of the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP).

Each system is configured with 18,816 compute cores via 1,176 compute nodes containing 16 Intel Sandy Bridge E5-2670 cores and 32 GB of memory. Each node runs RedHat Linux 6.2 and has access to the 2.8 PB GPFS parallel filesystem as well as the 4X FDR-10 Mellanox Infiniband communication fabric. The batch queuing system is PBSPro version 11.3. Other software of note on the systems includes the IBM Parallel Environment, Intel Compiler Suite, Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL), GNU Compiler Suite, OpenMPI and the TotalView Debugger.


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New Zealand eScience Infrastructure Beefs Up IBM HPC Resources

By Staff | Published February 12, 2013

IBM has provided extra high-performance computing capacity to the Universities of Auckland and Otago within a new collaboration called the New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI), aimed at making large-scale scientific computing more widely available to New Zealand researchers.

Otago University is co-funding the latest purchase at The University of Auckland’s Centre for eResearch alongside Landcare Research.

The Centre for eResearch is a major partner in NeSI, a $47 million, four-year Government and research sector-backed initiative to provide national supercomputing and eScience services to New Zealand researchers.

The other NeSI partners are the University of Canterbury and NIWA (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research), both of which also utilise IBM infrastructure for high-performance computing.

Other Crown Research Institutes and universities can also purchase time on this cluster (and other NeSI resources) at a heavily discounted rate thanks to the funding provided by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.

The sale at Auckland University, phase three of a four stage programme, increases the supercomputing platform’s processing capacity to around 3,000 CPU cores. IBM General Parallel File System software ties the IBM System x, iDataPlex and Linux-based cluster together, enabling efficient job scheduling for the 140 researchers using the platform.

Migrating projects onto the centrally managed facility is helping to provide a more reliable high-performance computing service, and extra staff have been recruited to manage the larger infrastructure and support the many diverse research projects that are now underway.

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

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University of Bayreuth to Install AMD Opteron-powered MEGWARE Cluster

By Ralph | Published February 1, 2013

Today MEGWARE announced a 1.25 million-euros contract with the University of Bayreuth in Germany for a new supercomputer to be delivered this Spring. Powered by 9,696 AMD Opteron 6348 processor cores and QDR Infiniband, the system will be used in the modeling and numerical processing of problems which deal with the development of micro-structures in complicated materials.

In this project, praxis relevant application benchmarks were of prime importance. After being tested on various CPU architectures and system configurations, it was shown that the AMD Opteron processors offered the best price-performance ratio,” said MEGWARE HPC engineer Nico Mittenzwey, giving more background about the decision.

Read the Full Story.

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Cineca Super Resets the Bar on Energy Efficiency with Nvidia GPUs

By Rich Brueckner | Published January 31, 2013

Today Nvidia announced that the hybrid Eurora supercomputer at Cineca in Italy has set a new record for data center energy efficiency using Kepler GPUs. Built by Eurotech, the hot water-cooled Eurora system reached 3,150 megaflops per watt of sustained performance, which is 26 percent better than the top system on the most recent Green500 list.

Advanced computer simulations that enable scientists to discover new phenomena and test hypotheses require massive amounts of performance, which can consume a lot of power,” said Sanzio Bassini, director of HPC department at Cineca. “Equipped with the ultra-efficient Aurora system and NVIDIA GPU accelerators, Eurora will give European researchers the computing muscle to study all types of physical and biological systems, while allowing us to keep data center power consumption and costs in check.”

Pairing NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPUs with Eurotech’s Aurora Hot Water Cooling technology, the Eurora system is more efficient and compact than conventional air-cooled solutions. HPC systems based on the Eurora hardware architecture, including the Eurotech Aurora Tigon, enable data centers to potentially reduce energy bills by up to 50 percent and reduce total cost of ownership by 30-50 percent.

In this video from ISC’12 in Hamburg, Giovanbattista Mattiussi from Eurotech describes the company’s prototype liquid-cooled Eurora GPU technology.

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NCSA Announces Initial Apps Running at Petascale

By Rich Brueckner | Published January 31, 2013

The Blue Waters supercomputer was originally billed as a “sustained petaflops supercomputer” and this week NCSA announced four application codes that are already running at Petascale.

Four large-scale science applications (VPIC, PPM, QMCPACK and SPECFEM3DGLOBE) have sustained performance of 1 petaflop or more on the Blue Waters supercomputer, and the Weather Research & Forecasting (WRF) run on Blue Waters is the largest WRF simulation ever documented. These applications are part of the NCSA Blue Waters Sustained Petascale Performance (SPP) suite and represent valid scientific workloads.

NCSA raised quite a stir recently when they decided not to run LINPACK for the TOP500 list and I think this focus on real science codes shows their continuing resolve. Read the Full Story.

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Altair PBS Works to Power Minerva Cluster University of Nottingham

By Ralph | Published January 29, 2013

Today Altair announced that the University of Nottingham has selected Altair’s PBS Works suite to expand the capabilities of its campus-wide HPC service based on Minerva, the university’s latest generation HPC cluster.

Working in partnership with ClusterVision, Altair will provide PBS Professional, Compute Manager and PBS Analytics to transform the 45 Tflop cluster into a robust and easily usable HPC service for the cluster’s hundreds of users. Altair was chosen over competitors because of its portal offerings, strong feature set and highly customizable framework. The company’s proven technology leadership and flexible approach were also key factors in the selection.

Read the Full Story.

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ClusterVision Partners to Deploy Minerva Supercomputer at the University of Nottingham

By Ralph | Published January 24, 2013

This week ClusterVision announced that the company and its partners have completed the deployment of a new HPC system at the University of Nottingham. The 45 Teraflop “Minerva” supercomputer will be used to drive academic research in a wide range of scientific disciplines.

As the prime contractor for the design, build and management of the Minerva system, ClusterVision managed a complex collaboration of 17 hardware and software partners. Key contributors to the Minerva project included Dell, Intel, Qlogic, Nvidia, Panasas, Bright Computing, Altair Engineering and Allinea.

The Minerva system comprises 2 redundant master nodes; Dell PowerEdge R720’s, with a single master node shared storage provided by the 2U 12 disk Dell PowerVault MD3200. The compute capacity is shared between 156 Dell PowerEdge nodes, arranged in Dell C6220 servers, with 12 high memory fast I/O nodes also in Dell 6220’s, and 6 additional GPU accelerated nodes. Originally designed using C6100 servers, the Dell compute node specification was subsequently upgraded to Dell PowerEdge C6620’s which were introduced as a vehicle for the latest Intel Xeon E5 Sandy Bridge processors. Each 2.6 Ghz compute unit contains a 500 GB local disk. The fast I/O nodes have 500 GB SATA and 4 100 GB SSD’s and are designed specifically for the high intensity needs of the applications. The 6 GPU accelerated nodes comprise a Supermicro base chassis, also incorporating the 8-core Intel Xeon E5 processor, together with 2 Tesla M2090 series GPU’s from NVIDIA.

Read the Full Story.

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Interview: Managing HLRN Cray Cascade Systems with Moab

By Rich Brueckner | Published January 18, 2013

This week Adaptive Computing announced that the HLRN Consortium in Germany will be using Moab to manage its new Cray Cascade supercomputers. To learn more I caught up with Wolfgang Dreyer, Lee Carter, and Chad Harrington from Adaptive.

insideHPC: This win at HLRN in Germany is part of a ongoing relationship. How long has the HRLN consortium been using Moab?

Wolfgang Dreyer

Wolfgang Dreyer: HLRN is a long time customer of Adaptive Computing. HLRN was looking during the tender to available competitive solutions but having experience with Moab and Cray offering the Moab solution as part of their offering made a strong partnership a winning team-play.

Lee Carter

Lee Carter: HLRN first became an Adaptive (Moab) customer back in 2008 when they purchased their existing SGI environment – the system the new Cray hardware will be replacing.

insideHPC: What do you think makes Moab the resource management tool of choice for HLRN?

Wolfgang Dreyer: HLRN is using a wide variety of Moab modules already. Grid functionality and Accounting Manager are two of them as well as HLRN is keen to use and adopt the newly developed Power functionality on an optimized CRAY environment.

Lee Carter: In addition, maximum, business-aligned utilization of their systems is important. Our alignment of budget allocations to utilization using Moab Accounting Manager is key. Power-aware workload management is very much an additional value-add capability we will be jointly exploring and weaving into their day-to-day operations in collaboration with Cray and HLRN going forward.

insideHPC: The Cray “Cascade” systems at HLRN represent the state-of-the-art in clustering technology from the company and even features its own version of Linux. How closely do you work with Cray to ensure that Moab can optimize management of HPC resources?

Chad Harrington

Chad Harrington: Adaptive has long worked closely with Cray, since we have many common customers. Cray makes many of the world’s largest systems and Moab is particularly well suited for very large systems and workloads. As a result, Adaptive and Cray work together to ensure that Moab can take best advantage of Cray’s unique architecture and capabilities.

Lee Carter: Cray Cascade systems have a special interconnect technology invented by Cray. Moab is aware of this interconnect structure and can place Jobs depending on the JOB Specification on specific blades taking interconnect hops to account or depending on cache and memory availability. These are only a small fraction of parameters Moab can handle on Cray systems.

insideHPC: HLRN does a wide variety of research spanning from bio-informatics, chemistry, climate and ocean modeling, engineering, environmental research, and fluid dynamics to physics. With such a diverse workload, how do you ensure that the systems don’t get bogged down and are kept busy?

Wolfgang Dryer: Moab HPC Suite, Enterprise Edition has features that have long since been used by HLRN. One feature is Grid Option, which helps to ensure that both clusters are load balanced. Load Balancing two remote locations has special challenges as you must take into account time delays and the communication with an independent cluster having it´s own job responsibilities that change each time.

The second feature is the accounting manager which is integrated into Enterprise Edition. This can administrate accounts for different research groups, which get “Fair share usage” of the cluster. Fair-Share can be based on money, compute time or other parameters available in accounting manager.

Moab policies ensure that the cluster is always used in optimized utilization even if a group of researchers do not have jobs to run at a certain time. In this case Jobs with low priority can run even when they would normally run later (also known as backfill). The policy engine ensures that backfill jobs get low priority or suspended when a new high priority job is expected to run.

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Video: Fujitsu Cluster Install at NCI

By Ralph | Published January 17, 2013

In this time-lapse video, technicians install a Fujitsu Primergy cluster at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) at the Australian National University in Canberra. With 57,000 x86 cores, the Primergy is #24 on the TOP500 list.

A Tip of the Hat goes out to Datacenter Knowledge for pointing us to this video.


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Video: The Art of Networking a Petascale System

By Rich Brueckner | Published January 16, 2013

In this video from the Mellanox event at SC12, Anke Kamrath from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) presents: The Art of Networking a Petascale System. The video includes remarkable images of networking topology from the Yellowstone supercomputer in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Also posted in Events, HPC, HPC Hardware, Network, SC12, Video | Leave a comment

NETL’s New SGI Super Sets the Bar for Energy Efficiency

By Rich Brueckner | Published January 16, 2013

The Office of Fossil Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has deployed a new SGI ICE Cube Air modular data center with extreme energy efficiency. Currently ranked at #55 on the TOP500, the system is being used for energy research at various scales ranging from molecules, to devices, to entire power plants and natural fuel reservoirs.

This datacenter provides the HPCEE one of the lowest power utilization efficiency (PUE) infrastructures available, with a range of 1.01 to 1.1 PUEs. To date, the HPCEE has one of the lowest recorded PUEs achieved in the industry, using only one percent of total electrical consumption to cool the equipment—far surpassing the DOE Office of the Chief Information Officer’s standard of 40 percent. The increase in efficiency translates to electrical energy cost savings of approximately $450,000 annually.

Read the Full Story.


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LSU Powers Up SuperMike-II, A Hybrid SMP Cluster from Dell

By Rich Brueckner | Published January 15, 2013

Louisiana State University has announced the addition of the SuperMike-II, a hybrid cluster with Nvidia GPU accelerators and large-memory symmetric multiprocessing. Named after LSU’s original Supermike Linux cluster, the 212 teraflop system is 10 times faster than its immediate predecessor, Tezpur.

Built by Dell, Inc., the $2.6 million SuperMike-II features a total of 440 compute nodes (servers), each of which has 2 Intel Sandy Bridge 8-core processors running at 2.6GHz. Thus the system provides a grand total of 7040 computational cores. The nodes are interconnected by a 40Gbps Mellanox InfiniBand network. While most of the nodes (382) have 32GB of memory, 8 are equipped with 256GB each and joined via ScaleMP software to give a single SMP machine with 128 processing cores and 2TB of memory. Fifty nodes are each equipped with 64GB of memory, and two NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs.

To be used by researchers for applications ranging from coastal modeling to molecular dynamics and protein folding, the SMP component will also allow new work to be done in the area of graph theory, genome sequencing, and quantum mechanics. The GPU accelerators will be utilized for the design of new materials and new medicines using novel computational methods, and will be used to advance LSU’s commitment to digital media research and production facilities. Read the Full Story.

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HLRN to Split 2.6 Petaflop Cray Cascade Between Berlin and Hannover

By Staff | Published January 11, 2013

Over at The Register, Timothy Prickett Morgan writes that the German HLRN consortium is going to have a different brand name and architecture now that Cray has beat out SGI for a 2.6 petaflop supercomputer.

During the first phase of system construction in the autumn of 2013, the initial XC30 system will go in with 1,488 dual-socket processor nodes sporting the next-generation “Ivy Bridge” Xeon E5 processors from Intel. The assumption is that the top-end Xeon E5 2600 v2 processors will sport ten cores compared to the “Sandy Bridge” v1 chips and their eight cores. So this machine should have a total of 29,760 cores in the initial stage, all linked together using the “Aries” dragonfly interconnect.

According to the specifications for the HLRN-III supercomputer, the Lustre-powered system will once again be split in two with one half in Berlin and one half in Hannover. Read the Full Story.

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