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Posts Tagged ‘HPCN’

ETH Board Confirms Support to HPCN Strategy for 2012-2016

Thursday, July 14th, 2011

ETH Board decided on July 8, 2011 to continue to adhere to its strategic plan for 2012-2016 and to support the High-Performance Computing and Networking (HPCN) strategy together with other large-scale projects.

Additional resources demanded for the implementation of the strategic plan
As to the large-scale projects, the ETH Board intends to implement the projects stipulated in its strategic plan for 2013-2016, provided that it receives adequate funds for that period. This includes High-Performance Computing and Networking (HPCN) at the ETH Zurich, the X-ray free electron laser Swiss-FEL at the PSI and the neuroinformatics project Blue Brain at the EPFL.

In particular, the ETH Board resolved to continue the national HPCN strategy with the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) at the ETH Zurich in the Ticino for the years 2012-2016. The focus will be on further investments in a high-performance computer as a flagship machine and the clear establishment of the CSCS as a user laboratory for the education and research landscape and its most demanding projects.

Read the press release of ETH Board »

Tags: CSCS, ETH Board, HPCN
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Workshop on Large-Scale Data Analysis

Friday, January 21st, 2011

The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) invites you to a

Workshop on large-scale data analysis
10:30 AM – 04:30 PM; Friday February 18, 2011, Radisson Blu Hotel, Lucerne

The workshop is aimed at researchers who are facing challenges in data analytics and are looking for an adequate facility in Switzerland to analyze their data efficiently.

Registration on http://www.cscs.ch/278.0.html

Introduction

Many researchers are faced with massive volumes of data through experiments, observations and simulations in many applications such as material sciences, medicine, genomics, high-energy physics, climate research and astrophysics. Data analysis applications may differ significantly from the current HPC workloads in that the data structures are often irregular without the high degree of spatial and temporal locality seen in physics-based simulations using regular matrices.

CSCS will start in the next months a new project called “EUREKA” aimed to offer dedicated to large-scale data analysis services. The proposed analysis facility will be used for large-scale analysis of unstructured data and data mining. It is purpose-built for parallel applications that are dynamically changing, require random access to shared memory and typically do not run well on conventional systems and will offer a low latency, high bandwidth and large capacity parallel file system

Agenda

10:00 Registration and Coffee

10:30 Welcome and Introduction (Dominik Ulmer, CSCS)

11:00 An overview of the General Parallel Filesystem (Thomas Schoenemeyer, CSCS)

11:30 Data-related challenges in climate research (Isabelle Bey, Center for Climate Systems Modeling, ETH Zurich)

12:00 Data challenges in brain research (Fritjof Helmchen, Brain Research Institute
University of Zurich)

Break

13:30 Cray XMT2 Architecture (Shoaib Mufti, Cray)

14:45 Coffee Break

15:00 SGI Altix UV for data-intensive applications (Rüdiger Wolff, SGI)

15:30 User Access Model (Maria Grazia Giuffreda, CSCS)

16:00 Discussion

16:30 End

Location

Radisson Blu Hotel

Lakefront Center, Inseliquai 12, 6005 Lucerne, Switzerland

Tel: +41 41 369 90 00, Fax: +41 41 369 90 01

info.lucerne@radissonblu.com

Tags: CSCS, Data Analytics, HPCN
Posted in Conference, CSCS, HPCN | 1 Comment »

Laying the Foundation Stone for CSCS Building in Lugano

Monday, October 18th, 2010

Monday, October 18 has been an important day for the implementation of the Swiss National HPC Initiative (HPCN). In Lugano Cornaredo there was the ceremony for the laying of the foundation stone for the new CSCS building. The ceremony has been attended by representatives of ETH Zurich, the Canton of Ticino, the City of Lugano, Implenia (the construction contractor) together with a lot of other guests.

Raffaele Balmelli, head of Implenia Ticino, Thomas Schultess, Director CSCS and Roman Boutellier Vice President Personal and Ressources of ETH Zurich during the foundation stone ceremony on the construction site.

Handshake between Raffaele Balmelli (Implenia) and Roman Boutellier (ETH Zurich).

The total investment for the new building will be about 80 millions CHF. The new center is needed to host the future national supercomputer with a computing capacity of some petaflops and a power consumption of up to 5 Megawatt (the existing building in Manno is limited to less than to 2 Megawatt). Special attention has been put to reducing the energy consumption of the whole center. The offices will be build according to the Minergie standard and the supercomputer will be cooled using water from the lake of Lugano. The excess heat will be made available to the city of Lugano.

The new building in Lugano should be ready by the end of 2011 and the relocation from Manno to Lugano ought to be done by mid 2012.

Case Study of University of Zurich and Intel on High-Performance Computing

Monday, January 25th, 2010

University of Zurich and Intel commonly announced a case study for the use of Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 and 5400 series for Schrödiger, the new Sun HPC system of the university.

The University has been at the forefront of scientific research for many years and relies heavily on its HPC cluster to underpin complex calculations and simulations. Its environment was beginning to age, resulting in slow response times and even the inability to carry out certain simulations.

Dr. Alexander Godknecht, head of IT-infrastructure, bioinformatics and HPCN, IT Services at the University of Zürich, explains: “Many of our compute-heavy departments were having trouble getting what they needed out of the old platform. The astrophysics team, for example, needs large amounts of memory to carry out its calculations while the physical chemists require fast networks with low latency and multiple cores in order to get the compute performance to support their computations. Meanwhile, the biochemistry researchers were hardly able to compute their thousands of simulations as the time taken to do them was just too long.”

University of Zurich selected for the new HPC system called Schrödinger a solution provided by Sun and Intel. The environment deployed is underpinned by six 48-blade racks of Sun Blade X6275 server modules, powered by a total of 4,608 Intel Xeon processor 5500 series cores. Running a SUSE Linux Enterprise* operating system, it supports all the applications used by the various departments to ensure the cluster is kept free to run the parallel applications for which the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series is optimised.

“We´re confident that the new cluster provided by Sun and Intel will last us for a good few years and enable us to push ahead with new scientific breakthroughs that Schrödinger himself would be proud of,” concludes Dr. Godknecht. The industry has already recognised the University´s new cluster by ranking it 96th in the Top 500 Supercomputers worldwide.

While the cluster is currently used exclusively by scientists based at the University of Zürich, it forms a part of the general HPC strategy in Switzerland led by the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). Like other countries, Switzerland has a strategy for a national HPC infrastructure. A grid or a series of smaller clusters form the base of the pyramid, followed by big clusters like Schrödinger and at the top of the national pyramid will be the planned Petabytelevel Supercomputer at CSCS. By providing a platform where scientists can write and test codes for thousands of processing cores, the University of Zürich will be part of the Swiss national plan for High Performance Computing and Networking.

Press Release: Case Study Univerity of Zurich and Intel »

Tags: HPCN, Intel, Schrödinger, Sun, University of Zurich
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HP2C: First 8 Projects Accepted

Monday, January 18th, 2010

The first 8 projects to be supported by HP2C have been accepted. A decision about 4 additional projects is expected in the next weeks.

In December 2009, the steering committee of HP2C selected the following 8 projects to be supported:

Advanced Gyrokinetic – Advanced gyrokinetic numerical simulations of turbulence in fusion plasmas; Prof. Laurent Villard, EPF Lausanne
CP2K – New Frontiers in ab initio Molecular Dynamics; Prof. Dr. Juerg Hutter, Uni Zürich
Computational Cosmology Computational Cosmology on the Petascale; Prof. Dr. George Lake, Uni Zürich
Selectome – Selectome, looking for Darwinian evolution in the tree of life; Prof. Dr. Marc Robinson-Rechavi, Uni Lausanne
Cardiovascular System – HPC for Cardiovascular System Simulations; Prof. Alfio Quarteroni, EPFL
MAQUIS – Modern Algorithms for Quantum Interacting Systems; Prof. Thierry Giamarchi, University of Geneva
PETAQUAKE – Large-Scale Parallel Nonlinear Optimization for High Resolution 3D-Seismic Imaging; Dr. Olaf Schenk, Uni Basel
Stellar Explosions – Productive 3D Models of Stellar Explosions; Dr. Matthias Liebendörfer, Uni Basel

A decision about 4 additional projects is expected in the next weeks.

For additional information about HP2C and its projects see »

Tags: CSCS, HP2C, HPCN
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