Single Node “Cyclops” Supercomputer Looks to Set Records

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Today the Radio Free HPC podcast team announced announced plans to build what they hope will be the “fastest single-node supercomputer in the world” for the High Performance Conjugate Gradients Benchmark (HPCG).

Codenamed “Project Cyclops”, the single-node supercomputer demonstrates the computational power that individual scientists, engineers, artificial intelligence practitioners, and data scientists can deploy in their offices.

The Radio Free HPC team includes Rich Brueckner (insideHPC), Henry Newman (CTO Seagate Government Solutions), as well as Dan Olds and Shahin Khan (both from OrionX.net, a research and consulting firm). Project Cyclops is led by Dan Olds.

We’ve done more than 150 podcasts talking about topics in high performance computing,” said Dan Olds, partner at OrionX.net Research. “It was time we actually put something together and take a run at some of these benchmarks.” Rich Brueckner commented, “We couldn’t have done this without our sponsors, who include Intel, Kingston Technology, Supermicro, Seagate, CoolIT Systems, and RedLine Performance Solutions. They’ve been incredibly helpful.”

Project Cyclops is building a system based on a chassis provided by Supermicro and is fueled by a pair of Intel Xeon E5 v4 processors, 128 GB of Kingston DDR4 memory, and M2 SSD drives from Seagate. CoolIT Systems’ innovative Rack DCLC™ AHx2 liquid-to-air heat exchanger will manage CPU and GPU liquid cooling inside the node. RedLine Performance Solutions will provide system testing and will help optimize the system for benchmarking and workload runs.

The Supercomputing community was first to connect many workstations to build a high-performance, low-cost system, thus ushering in the scale-out/cluster model of computing. Today, scale-out systems power not just supercomputers, but also commercial cloud computing installations.

Supercomputing is an early-adopter market that pursues maximum performance by being extremely open to new technologies, new uses for existing technologies, and new approaches,” said Shahin Khan, founding partner at OrionX.net. “Project Cyclops shows how blending the best in server, desktop, and mobile technologies can craft the fastest single-node system, and encourages others to follow its example.”

The computer configuration and benchmark results will be posted on projectcyclops.radiofreehpc.com. RadioFreeHPC will cover the progress of this project in its regular podcasts.

The team will continue to run benchmarks to keep raising the bar,” according to Henry Newman, CTO Seagate Government Solutions. “The system will eventually be donated to a deserving educational institution and the team will go on to build a successor system.”

It is envisioned that the educational organization will be selected via a grant contest in early 2019.

The Radio Free HPC podcast can be found on iTunes and at www.radiofreehpc.com.

For more information, contact: Dan.Olds@OrionX.net

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