Video: L-CSC Cluster Tops Green500 with AMD Firepro

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Dr. Rohr, and the L-CSC cluster,  currently 1st on the Green 500 List

Dr. Rohr, and the L-CSC cluster, currently 1st on the Green 500 List

In this video, describe the Lattice-CSC cluster in Darmstadt, Germany. Currently the most energy-efficient supercomputer on the November, 2014 Green500 list, the Lattice-CSC is powered by 640 AMD FirePro S9150 GPUs to achieve 5.27 GFLOPS/Watt.

With LQCD being the main focus of Lattice-CSC, and the D-Slash kernel being the computational hotspot, we wanted to employ hardware which provides the best D-Slash performance for the fixed budget we had,” said Dr. David Rohr, postdoctoral scholar at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS). “This means we need hardware with great memory bandwidth. Important for us is not the acquisition cost, but the total cost of ownership. And with the rising energy prices, power efficiency has become a very important aspect. Fortunately for us, GPUs in general provide both, great power efficiency and great memory bandwidth. Since our application is based on OpenCL, we wanted a GPU with good OpenCL support of course. In addition, maintainability and stability play an important role for a cluster of the size of Lattice-CSC. We decided that the AMD FirePro S9150 GPU was the best choice, being a professional card that offers very high memory bandwidth and good energy-efficiency.”

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