246 teraflops of the new computing systems in PSNC

2012-02-01

246 teraflops of the new computing systems in PSNC
Two innovative computing systems, installed late last year at Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC), have recently been made available for the Polish scientific community.

The total computing power of both systems is more than 246 TFLOPS (246 trillion operations per second), equivalent to about 5,000 mid-range personal computers, using a high-performance water cooling system, innovative storage solutions and advanced networking technologies with the highest available bandwidth and lowest latency. Both systems purchased within the PL-GRID and POWIEW national projects will be used to conduct scientific research in such fields as: biochemistry, computational astrophysics, and solving the Grand Challenges.

• SGI Ultraviolet offering 16TB of operational memory and 2048 processors under the control of a single instance of the Linux operating system; the system is based on the 15 GB / s network. It is the only such system in Poland.

• Cluster equipped with 454 12-core processors from the latest AMD Opteron series (Interlagos), and additionally 334 NVIDIA Tesla modules based on GPUs, connected to InfiniBand QDR network in the fat-tree topology, offering a bandwidth of 32 Gbit / s. The system was on the list of the 500 fastest computers in the world (top500.org) published in November.

UltraViolet system, built in cooperation with SGI, is already available for computations. The second system which was mentioned in The Wall Street Journal; is currently undergoing final tests. Its full configuration will be available at the beginning of February.