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Posts Tagged ‘Palu’

Cray’s Gemini Interconnect Wins HPCwire Editors’ Choice Award

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

Last August we presented Palu, the newest Cray XE6 installed at CSCS. Palu was part of a joint collaboration between Cray and CSCS, to enable CSCS and its user community to undertake testing and early familiarization with Cray´s next generation hardware and software technologies.

At the 2010 Supercomputing Conference in New Orleans, LA, Cray Inc. announced that the Company’s new Gemini interconnect used for Palu has been named “Best HPC Interconnect Product or Technology” by the editors of HPCwire as part of the publication’s 2010 Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards.

“With the advent of multi-core and many-core processors, there is now a critical need for powerful, scalable networks in order to make supercomputers efficient — it is what separates a supercomputer from a cluster,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “We are dedicated to building the most scalable HPC systems available and our Gemini interconnect lies at the heart of these systems. The Cray XE6 and Cray XE6m supercomputers include a mix of features and performance designed specifically for the petascale environment, and it’s all made possible by our Gemini interconnect.

Read the press release of Cray »

Tags: Cray, CSCS, Palu
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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.

Tags: Cray, CSCS, Palu
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A New Home for Palu: The ENTER Museum for Computer

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

In a previous blog entry we reported about the Cray XT3, Palu, being decommissioned at CSCS. In the meantime we were able to give a new home to the three of the six computing racks at ENTER, the Museum for Computer and Technology close to Solothurn.

Das ENTER ist das einzige Museum in der Schweiz, welches sich der gesamten Breite der Computer, Computerperipherie und Technik widmet. Vermutlich weltweit einzigartig ist die Anzahl noch funktionierender Computersysteme. Nebst den ca. 400 Computern werden auch 100 Taschenrechner, ca. 50 mechanische Rechenmaschinen, Telekommunikation vom Telegrafen, Zentralen über die Telefonie bis zum modernen Handy, Röhrenradios, Röhrenfernsehgeräte, Chiffriermaschinen und vieles andere gezeigt.

It is a good feeling to know that computing systems running once at CSCS can be viewed by the generations of people. The Cray XT3 was an important step for CSCS being the first massively parallel MIMD supercomputer used at CSCS. Palu was used both by researchers of Swiss universities and by MeteoSwiss for weather forecasts.

In the next photos you may see some steps of the shipping of the three racks (each with a weight of about 830 kg). In addition a SGI Origin 9500 has also been donated to the museum.

The first Cray XT3 rack exits the CSCS building:

The rack being loaded on the truck for transport:

The console of the Cray XT3 and an additional rack are loaded in the computer room for transport.

Farewell of the Cray by the director of CSCS, Prof. Thomas Schulthess

Tags: CSCS, ENTER Museum, Palu
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Decommission of «Palu» at CSCS

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

On January 27th, 2010 the Cray XT3 has reached the end of its life here at CSCS, for the last time the system has been shut down and disassembled.

This computer has been named after Piz Palü in the Bernina range in Graubunden, Eastern Switzerland with an elevation 3901 m and his last configuration has been the follow:

6 Cabinets containing 14 service processing elements (PEs), subdivided into 7 service blades, and 548 dual core nodes giving 1096 compute PEs subdivided into 137 compute blade
3 GB of Ram (Compute nodes)

Palu started its life as production system on January 2006. This computer was the very first Cray XT machine to set foot on Europe. It was the first supercomputer based on the XT architecture thatrun Catamount operating system using Infiniband as high-speed interconnect. Palu was mainly used for massively parallel jobs.

Of the 6 cabinets of Palu, two will be disassembled by Cray to be used as spare parts, one will stay at CSCS and be the first exhibit of an own museum. The last three cabinets will be shipped next week to a compter museum near to Solothurn. Stay tuned on this blog to get additional information on the museum next week…

In the next photos you may see the technician of Cray starting the disassembling of Palu (this will need almost three working days).

Disassembling of the interconnect.

The interconnect cables and removing the power supply cables.

Another view of the interconnect being disassembled:

Disassembling part of the compute blades to be used as spare parts.

Tags: CSCS, MeteoSwiss, Palu
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