From: Grid Today (grid@gridtoday.com)
Date: Thu 04 Jul 2002 - 20:19:31 EEST
HPC2N BUILDS NEW HPC LINUX CLUSTER 07.01.02
SCIENTIFIC APPLICATIONS GRIDtoday
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Oslo, NORWAY -- The High-Performance Computing Center North (HPC2N), located
at Umea University, Sweden, has built a new HPC Linux cluster with a peak
performance of 800 GigaFLOPS/s. This high performance is achieved using 240
AMD Athlon MP2000+ processors in 120 dual nodes and interconnected with the
innovative WulfKit3, a high-speed interconnect system provided by Dolphin
Interconnect Solutions that features a three-dimensional torus distributed
switch topology.
According to Kare Lochsen, Dolphin Interconnect CEO Managing Director, "the
Umea cluster is one of the first installations adopting the Dolphin
three-dimensional cluster architecture. The fact that it is showcased at this
national center for high-performance computing especially spotlights the power
and innovation of the WulfKit3 interconnect system."
The 120 nodes in the supercluster, also known as a Beowulf cluster, are
interconnected as a 4x5x6 "torus," or logical cube, using one WulfKit3 card in
each node. WulfKit3 is designed around the scalable coherent interface (SCI)
standard, which accounts for the very high bandwidth, low-latency interconnect
performance. WulfKit3 is a combination of a PCI SCI Adapter Card developed by
Dolphin Interconnect, and a powerful message-passing interface (MPI)
implementation developed by Scali, also located in Oslo. Very large
superclusters can be built and managed using WulfKit3.
In recent testing, the supercluster has shown superior performance on the
HP-Linpack benchmark. The performance of 480.7 Gflops/s was obtained when
solving an NxN dense linear system Ax = b for N = 116,100. This performance
level clearly places the system in the top 100 of the world's fastest
supercomputers as tracked by top500.org, a joint project of the University of
Mannheim and the University of Tennessee. The Umea supercluster is the most
powerful system in Sweden.
"This new supercluster is an impressive addition to the University's computing
capabilities and substantially strengthens our leadership in HPC," said Bo
Kagstrom, Director of HPC2N and Professor, Department of Computing Science,
Umea University. "The increased computing capabilities will be immensely
beneficial to the academic and research programs that HPC2N supports,"
Kagstrom added.
The primary objective of HPC2N is to raise the national level of competence in
high performance computing and to transfer HPC knowledge and technology to new
users in academia and industry. The Center supports a variety of HPC users and
projects, including scientific visualization, parallel numerical linear
algebra, bioinformatics and computational bioscience. In addition to providing
an HPC facility for research computing, the Center is actively involved in
computer and HPC academic programs at the University.
Umea University has been offering education in high-performance and parallel
computing since 1985 and was the first in Sweden to provide HPC education at
the graduate level.
The WulfKit3 cluster joins two existing HPC clusters at HPC2N, a 68-node IBM
RS/6000 SP system and a smaller SGI Onyx2 system. As one of three national HPC
centers in Sweden, HPC2N and these systems are funded by the Swedish Council
for Planning and Coordination of Research (FRN), the Swedish Council for High
Performance Computing (HPDR), and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.
Partners in HPC2N are Umea University, Lulea University of Technology, The
Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) in Kiruna, Swedish University of
Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Umea, and Mid-Sweden University in Sundsvall,
Harnosand, Ornskoldsvik and Ostersund.
Web site: http://www.dolphinics.com
Web site: http://www.scali.com
Web site: http://www.amd.com
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