Last week at SC15, NEC Corporation announced that the Flemish Supercomputer Center (VSC) has selected an LX-series supercomputer. With a peak performance of 623 Teraflops, the new system will be the fastest in Belgium, ranking amongst the top 150 biggest and fastest supercomputers in the world. Financed by the Flemish minister for Science and Innovation in Belgium, the infrastructure will cost 5.5 million Euro.
It is an honor for NEC to provide a new supercomputer for the research and engineering at the VSC KU Leuven. NEC’s basic strategy in the high-performance-computing business is to focus on the users and their needs, aiming to achieve high sustained performance on real user codes to get the scientific results. Sustained performance is a key factor for NEC” said Bruno Lecointe, Senior Sales Manager western Europe, NEC Deutschland GmbH. “NEC wants to be a partner of science, not a hardware vendor. NEC is trying on closely cooperate with scientific users to understand the challenges they are facing and to address those challenges by our product.”
The NEC supercomputer in Leuven will support research in areas such as renewable energy sources, development of new materials or new medicines. The computer will enable researchers to compute more detailed climate models or research climate on other planets. For fundamental research, which is important on a medium term, the new system will also open new horizons.
“The Flemish Government is committed to investing in research and innovation. Our research institutions are among the best in the world. We can only maintain and strengthen that top position if we keep investing.” said the Flemish minister of Science and Innovation Philippe Muyters. “We were not only interested in buying a new start-of-the art hardware system, but also to offer to the Flemish research community a global solution that includes high quality software, training and consultancy services” said Ingrid Barcena Roig Tier 1 project leader at KU Leuven. “We are looking forward to start our collaboration with NEC. NEC has a large experience in building and managing high performance systems and we believe that their HPC expertise will help us to provide to our users an excellent machine that will boost their research to higher levels.”
Set for installation in mid-2016, the NEC supercomputer will utilize the newest generation of Intel processors E-2600v4, Mellanox EDR network interconnect, and NEC GxFS storage.
System Specifications
- 623 Tflops peak performance
- 580 Nodes Intel E5-2680v4
- Mellanox EDR 2:1
- 634 TB NEC GxFS file system
- 20GB/s aggregated peak performance and +24 000 IOPS
- Watercooled racks for best optimized TCO
- NEC LXC3 cluster solution, NEC Docker, NEC IBViz monitoring tool
