Posts Tagged ‘CSCS’

PRACE-1IP kick-off meeting in Garching, Germany

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

On  30-31 August 2010 the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (Leibniz-Rechenzentrum, LRZ) in Garching near Munich hosted the kick-off meeting of the First Implementation Phase Project of PRACE (PRACE-1IP). The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, PRACE (www.prace-project.eu), is a unique persistent pan-European Research Infrastructure for High Performance Computing. PRACE is a project funded in part by the EU’s 7th Framework Programme.

Thomas Eickermann of Jülich Supercomputing Centre welcoming the participants to the kick-off:

Switzerland is being represented in PRACE by CSCS who is contributing to the following working packages:

  • WP2 Evolution of the Research Infrastructure
  • WP3 Dissemination and Training
  • WP8 Support for the procurement and commissioning of HPC services
  • WP9 Future Technologies

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CSCS Appointed by HPC Advisory Council to Center of Excellence

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

The HPC Advisory Council, a leading worldwide organization for high-performance computing research, development, outreach and education, announced the formation of its regional Centers of Excellence, broadening the scope and mission of the Council’s programs throughout the world. The HPC Advisory Council Centers of Excellence will provide local support for the HPC Advisory Council’s programs, local workshops and conferences, as well as host local computing centers that can be used to extend such activities.

CSCS has been appointed as the first Center of Excellence in Europe. “One of the HPC Advisory Council’s main activities is community and education outreach, in particular, through enhancing the HPC knowledge-base around the world and exploring future solutions,” said Gilad Shainer, chairman of the HPC Advisory Council. “The HPC Advisory Council Centers of Excellence are located worldwide and will extend the activities of the council into local areas and focus on the regional needs for furthering our HPC outreach activities.”

“We are pleased to be named as one the inaugural HPC Advisory Council’s Centers of Excellence, covering HPC research, outreach and educational activities within Europe,” said Hussein Nasser El-Harake at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre who serves as the Director of the HPC Advisory Council Center of Excellence in Switzerland. “As part of the HPC Advisory Council’s Center of Excellence, we look forward to advancing awareness of the beneficial capabilities of HPC to new users.”

For more information about the HPC Advisory Council, please visit www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com.

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.

Easier Access to the CSCS Video Productions

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

The videos produced by CSCS can now easily be accessed over the multimedia portal of ETH Zurich. A special flash interface allows to easily browse through the videos to search for relevant content. The videos can also be downloaded in different file format and with different quality and file sizes. So they can used for display on large screens but also downloaded on mobile devices.

The opening of the CSCS channel is a good chance to have a view to some previous talks at CSCS.

For example “The Physics and Experiments at the LHC” (see previous blog posting):

Or the talk of Kathleen Kobe on “Concurrent Collections (CnC): A new approach to parallel programming” (see previous blog posting).

Or the CRAY XT5 code porting workshop of 2009.

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 »