ACADEMIA

Oslo, Norway and Natick, MA—The Swedish National Supercomputer Centre (NSC), located at Linkoping University, Sweden, has built a new cluster named “Monolith.” At 200 nodes, it is the largest supercomputer in Sweden. Each node features two Intel® Xeon™ processors at 2.2 GHz and is interconnected with the WulfKit3™ system provided by Dolphin Interconnect Solutions. The system ranks 51st on the 20th Top 500 Supercomputers List announced last Friday and has a measured LinPack performance of 960 GFlops. “As a cost-effective and highly scalable clustering solution, WulfKit3 is quickly establishing its place in the HPC market,” said Kare Lochsen, Dolphin Interconnect Solutions CEO. “The NSC cluster is taking our three-dimensional cluster architecture to new performance levels and clearly demonstrating the power and scalability of the WulfKit3 interconnect technology.” The 200 nodes in the cluster, also known as a Beowulf cluster, are interconnected in a 5x5x8 torus topology, or logical cube, using one WulfKit3 card in each node. WulfKit3 is based on the scalable coherent interface (SCI) standard, which accounts for the very high bandwidth, low-latency interconnect performance. WulfKit3 is a combination of a PCI SCI Adapter Card developed by Dolphin, and a powerful message-passing interface (MPI) implementation developed by Scali (Oslo, Norway). Very large clusters can be built and managed using WulfKit3. According to Matts Karlsson of NSC “this new cluster is a substantial addition to NSC’s computing facilities.” Monolith joins several other NSC computers, including a Cray T3E with 272 processors, a SGI 3800 with 128 processors, a SGI 2000 with 48 processors, and three SGI Onyx2 systems with a total of 36 processors, in addition to several smaller clusters. The second largest Sweden-based cluster employing WulfKit3 interconnect technology was installed earlier this year at the High-Performance Computing Center North (HPC2N), located at Umea University. That system consists of 120 dual-processor nodes and is ranked 124th on the Top 500 Supercomputer list (http://www.top500.org).