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Second cabinet of Cray XE6 installed at CSCS

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

On September 2, 2010 the second cabinet of the Cray XE6 arrived and was installed at CSCS (see previous posting). Both cabinets are identical and will be interconnected to build a single large system.

Continuing the tradition of CSCS, the Cray XE6 has been given the name of a Swiss mountain, in this case Palu. The Piz Palü is a mountain in the Bernina Range in the Canton of Graubünden. There are three summits on its ridge, the highest being 3′901 m high.

We should note that this has been the first installation in the world of a Cray XE6. CSCS and selected users have already run first benchmarks on Palu and they have been very promising. Palu will subsequently be made available to all users starting this week.

The second cabinet of Palu has been financed by the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI) and will be used in particular by researchers of the Insitute of Computational Science of Prof. Rolf Krause.

The next two photos show the arrival by truck of the cabinet at CSCS and the installation of the second door with a nice representation of the Piz Palü.

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First Cray XE6 Supercomputer installed at CSCS

Friday, August 6th, 2010

CSCS, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, is pleased to announce the successful installation of an early-release version of the new Cray XE6 supercomputing architecture manufactured by Cray Inc.

(Cross Posting from the CSCS news page)

The single cabinet, 20 blade system, contains 160 compute sockets and uses the new 2.1GHz, 12-core AMD Opteron (aka Magny-Cours) CPUs for a total of 1920 compute cores.  The machine, which has been named Piz Palu, has a theoretical peak performance of 16TFlop/s and 2.5 Terabytes of memory. Furthermore the machine contains Cray’s next generation interconnect network, named Gemini, which promises increased performance and fault tolerance over the previous generation SeaStar technology.  Moreover the Gemini interconnect promises better support for Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages such as Co-array Fortran (CAF) and Unified Parallel C (UPC).  This Cray XE6 system is part of a joint collaboration between Cray and CSCS, and will enable CSCS and its user community to undertake testing and early familiarization with Cray’s next generation hardware and software technologies.

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Monte Rosa: One Year Later

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

In June of 2009 Monte Rosa was inaugurated at CSCS (see the article on this blog). During the last year Rosa has been working day and night providing cycles to the Swiss researcher community. In this year the number of cores used by the jobs increased rapidly: 57% of the jobs use now more than 512 cores and 33% of the jobs use even more than 2048 cores (status first quarter 2010). 24% of the users are from fluid dynamics and 23% are from physics, followed by nanoscience (12%), earth and environmental sciences (11%) and chemistry (8%).

In the TOP500 ranking Rosa started at rank 23 (June 2009), moved after an upgrade to position 21 (November 2009) and is now at position 27 (June 2010).

We created a movie showing the assembly of Monte Rosa, if you want to have a look click on the image here below or follow this link »

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CHIPP Phoenix Phase C Now Fully Operational

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

CSCS is happy to announce that the Phase C of the Phoenix cluster of CHIPP has being put fully operational this Tuesday. At the same time Phase B has been switched off and is being decommissioned.

The cluster Phoenix is being used to analyze as Tier 2 the data being produced by the LHC experiment at CERN in Geneva. The old compute nodes will be transferred to Swiss universities and used in Tier 3 environments.

We wish the researchers of CHIPP and Cern gut luck in the search of new subatomic particles.

In the next pictures you see the Phoenix sysadmins dismantling the old hardware.

(more…)

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New Visualization Cluster Eiger Delivered at CSCS

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

The Visualization/Research & Development Cluster EIGER is a new CSCS facility which extends the current resource portfolio. During the Q2/Q3 2010 it will be fully integrated into the CSCS Supercomputing ecosystem, and will be opened to the swiss scientific user community for hybrid multicore/ multi-GPU computing, visualization, data analysis, and general purpose pre/post processing activities.

The Eiger mountain in the Swiss Alps …

… and the Eiger cluster in the CSCS machine room being assembled (the interconnect cables are still missing).

The EIGER cluster is a tightly coupled computing cluster system, running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Operating System release and includes 19 nodes based on the dual-socket six-cores AMD Opteron 2427 processor architecture running at 2.2 GHz, offering 24 GB of main system memory per node, for a total of 228 cpu cores and 552 GB aggregate memory. 4 out of 19 cluster nodes offers a larger main system memory capacity up to 48 GB.

Altair PBS Professional V 10.3 is the main batch queuing system installed and supported on the cluster in order to let end-users access in a shared or reserved mode any available visualization/computing resource.

Several class of nodes have been defined inside the cluster, covering special functionalities :

  • Class 0: Administration Node (1x)
  • Class 1: Login Node (1x)
  • Class 2: Visualization Nodes (7x)
  • Class 3: Fat Visualization Nodes (4x)
  • Class 4: Advanced Development Nodes (4x)
  • Class 5: Storage Nodes (2x)

Depending on the node class membership, cluster nodes are equipped with one of the two kind of GPUs family products :

  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 2 GB => Class 2/3 – soon to be extended with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 1.5 GB
  • NVIDIA TESLA S1070 GPUs 4 GB => Class 4 – soon to be extended with 2 upcoming new NVIDIA TESLA/FERMI S2070 6 GB

As an high speed network interconnect, the cluster EIGER rely on a dedicated Infiniband QDR fabric infrastructure, supporting both parallel-MPI traffic and the internal parallel scratch file system I/O data traffic. In addition, a commodity 10 GbE LAN ensures interactive login access, home, project and application file sharing among the cluster nodes, and a standard 1 Gbe administration network is also reserved for cluster management purposes.

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