Today Russia’s RSC Group announced that the company has achieved a record compute density of 1.41 Pflops per rack using direct liquid cooling and Intel Xeon Phi processors.
The RSC Tornado solution based on multi-core Intel Xeon Phi 7200 processor family has improved footprint and computing density, high energy efficiency, ease to manage and maintain as well as provides stable operation of computing nodes in “hot water” mode at +63 °С cooling agent temperature at node inputs.
Specifically, each RSC Tornado computing node is based on Intel Xeon Phi 7290 multi-core processor, Intel S7200AP server board with two Intel SSD DC S3500 Series M.2 340 GB and one Intel SSD DC P3100 (M.2 NVMe) solid state drives (PCIe interface) has been demonstrated at RSC booth as well as switches and adapters based on Intel Omni-Path Architecture (OPA) and Mellanox EDR InfiniBand high-speed interconnects.
At SC16, RSC also provided the technology sponsorship for German student team from Technical University of Munich (TUM) which was participating again in Student Cluster Competition. The Student Cluster Competition is a real-time, non-stop, 48-hour challenge in which teams need to complete and tune a real-world workload across a series of scientific applications on a cluster from commercially available components and not exceeding a 3120 watt power limit, demonstrate knowledge of system architecture and application performance, and impress HPC industry judges.
In this video, the Technical University of Munich team describes their hardware entry for the SC16 Student Cluster Competition.
The company supported the TUM student team from Munich with 8 nodes mobile cluster based on RSC Tornado direct liquid cooled architecture. This computing system provided stable operation of computing nodes in “hot water” mode at +63 °С cooling agent temperature at node inputs and had the following configuration: 72-cores Intel Xeon Phi 7290 processors, Intel S7200AP server boards, Intel SSD DC S3500 Series M.2 340 GB solid-state drives, switch and adapters based on Intel Omni-Path high-speed fabric, highly efficient Micron DDR4-2400 VLP 16-32 GB memory modules.
RSC also demonstrated at SC16 a storage solution utilizing the newest NVMe-over-Fabric protocol features. This is an extension to the original NVMe specifications that allows accessing remotely connected NVMe SSDs over RDMA-enabled fabric. Russian company showed at its booth a basic infrastructure of NVMe-over-Fabric Target system with multiple Intel SSD DC P3700 disks and connected via NVMe-over-Fabric hosts (RSC Tornado nodes based on Intel Xeon Phi 7290 processors) over Intel Omni-Path fabric switch. Such approach allows to address a block devices remotely with “close to local latency” which can be implemented in the I/O Node designs in HPC. To be noted, this is not a replacement to a traditional parallel storage – I/O nodes boost random I/O performance in the most effective way. Such example can be partitioning a SSD into multiple partitions, sharing them to compute nodes when it’s needed for a workload. This can be used as “scratch on demand” option available upon to request without reboot and re-configuration of a compute nodes.
RSC group is the leading developer and system integrator of turnkey new generation solutions for high-performance computing segment and data centers in Russia and CIS based on Intel architectures, innovative liquid cooling technologies and a number of its own know-hows. RSC has the potential to create the most energy efficient solutions with record-breaking power usage effectiveness (PUE), the highest computing density in the industry with standard x86-based processors, to use fully “green” design, provide the highest solution reliability, noise-free operation of computing modules, 100% compatibility and guaranteed scalability with unmatched low cost of ownership and low power consumption. RSC specialists also have the experience of developing and implementing an integrated software stack of solutions to improve work efficiency and application of supercomputer systems from system software to vertically oriented platforms based on cloud computing technologies.
RSC participates in Intel Technology Provider Program at Platinum level and Intel Fabric Builders Program has been recognized as Intel HPC Data Center Specialist. Performance and scalability of solutions based on RSC PetaStream and RSC Tornado architectures are Intel Cluster Ready certified.
