HPCwire: T-Platforms, Research Facilities Partner to Develop Next-Gen Supercomputers

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June 19, 2012

T-Platforms, Research Facilities Partner to Develop Next-Gen Supercomputers

HELSINKI – LUGANO – AMSTERDAM – MOSCOW, June 19 -- CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd., CSCS - Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, SARA -Dutch national centre for HPC & e-science support, and T-Platforms announced a partnership to deliver a next-generation supercomputer prototype system. The system is part of the future HPC technology assessment activities of the pan-European PRACE Research Infrastructure (PRACE RI).

The prototype will be used to evaluate power efficiency, manageability and novel programming environments. It will combine the latest innovations in packaging, cooling, interconnect and accelerator co-processing technology as well as OS and systems management solutions. The prototype will also be used to develop highly scalable parallel hybrid applications which efficiently leverage both the CPU and accelerator co-processors. The system will be large enough to enable the study of scaling properties of benchmarks and parallel scientific and technical applications.

The prototype hardware to be deployed at CSC is based on T-Platforms’ next-generation architecture codenamed T-REX. The full-scale system will be delivered in 2013 with a theoretical peak performance of up to 400 TFLOPS. The system contains 256 hybrid compute nodes in a hot-water cooled rack, incorporating Intel processors as well as NVIDIA Tesla and Intel MIC accelerators. The system also includes an InfiniBand-based network with several SW enhancements to improve scalability, such as adaptive routing. The initial prototype will be delivered in Q3’12 and will include a smaller number of hybrid nodes based on T-Platforms V-class architecture.

“The prototype combines a number of technological innovations that potentially provide significant improvements in performance, productivity, scalability as well as energy-efficiency. The architecture could be realistically implemented in near-future high-end HPC systems and this prototype will improve our preparedness to leverage the full potential of such systems.” says technical coordinator Olli-Pekka Lehto from CSC.

The prototype will run the T-Platforms Cluster Management Software Suite providing advanced capabilities for system deployment, monitoring and management which will result, in particular, in establishment of the relation between application performance and electricity consumption and implementation of highly efficient power management techniques. The cooling solution will enable building a generic framework for chain assessment of energy efficiency all the way from datacenter to application, to refine future datacenter designs for higher efficiency.

Various programming paradigms such as CUDA+MPI, OpenMP with MIC, OpenCL, OpenACC, SHMEM and PGAS are going to be evaluated using a set of benchmarks selected in collaboration with other PRACE partners.

CSC and T-Platforms will collaborate in porting the GPAW (DFT) and Elmer (FEM) applications to the system with the goal to utilize the accelerators efficiently and optimize the internode communication between accelerators as well as to improve checkpoint-restart performance. SARA will focus on evaluating power efficiency and developing energy-to-solution tools, as well as evaluating a different accelerator architecture by a number of relevant applications, such as Crunch and Crunch2 (X-Ray crystallography), Voxel 3d (ortohopedics) and Rbflow (CFD) codes. CSCS will focus on exploring portable, directives-based programming approaches and direct accelerator-to-accelerator communication paradigms for scalable code development.

About CSC

CSC — IT Center for Science Ltd is administered by the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. CSC is a non-profit company providing IT support and resources for academia, research institutes and companies: modeling, computing and information services. CSC provides Finland's widest selection of scientific software and databases and Finland's most powerful supercomputing environment that researchers can use via the Funet network. Learn more at www.csc.fi

About CSCS
CSCS — the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, develops and promotes technical and scientific services for the Swiss research community in the fields of high-performance computing. CSCS enables world-class scientific research by pioneering, operating and supporting leading-edge supercomputing technologies. The centre collaborates with domestic and foreign researchers, and carries out its own research in scientific computing. Located in Lugano, in the southern, Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, CSCS is an autonomous unit of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). Learn more at www.cscs.ch

About SARA
SARA supports research in the Netherlands by developing and offering advanced ICT infrastructure, services and expertise. SARA ensures this support by (1) providing an integrated ICT research infrastructure withservices in the areas of computing, data storage, visualization, networking, cloud and e-Science and (2) the provision of multidisciplinary expertise and support in applications and ICT technology. Learn more at www.sara.nl.

About T-Platforms
T-Platforms is a global supplier of solutions and services for high performance computing. Founded in 2002, T-Platforms maintains headquarters in Moscow (Russia) and regional offices in Hanover (Germany), Taipei (Taiwan), Campbell (USA), and Hong Kong (China). Learn more at www.t-platforms.com

About PRACE
The purpose of the PRACE RI is to provide a sustainable high-quality infrastructure for Europe that can meet the most demanding needs of European HPC user communities through the provision of user access to the most powerful HPC systems available worldwide at any given time. Learn more at www.prace-project.eu

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Source: T-Platforms

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