ACADEMIA

Natick, MA—The 20th Top 500 Supercomputers list includes two new supercluster systems built with the Dolphin WulfKit high-speed interconnect. The systems, ranking 51 and 302, are installed at Linkoping University, Sweden, and Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany, respectively. “These newest rankings represent some of the highest supercluster performance yet achieved with the Dolphin Interconnect WulfKit, the high-speed, low-latency SCI (scalable coherent interface) interconnect,” said Keith Murphy, Dolphin VP of Sales. “This superior performance is typical of what can be achieved with our innovative three-dimensional switching architecture,” Murphy explained. The Top 500 Supercomputers list has been published by Mannheim University (Mannheim, Germany) since June 1993 and is updated twice annually. Supercomputers are ranked on the Top 500 according to performance levels measured by the LINPACK Benchmark while solving a dense system of linear equations. The Linkoping University supercluster is installed at Sweden’s National Supercomputing Centre. The 200 nodes in the cluster are interconnected as a three-dimensional 5x5x8 torus, or logical cube. The superior performance, which earned the cluster the 51st position on the Top 500 list, is achieved with 400 Intel® XeonTM processors interconnected with the Dolphin WulfKit3, a high-speed interconnect that features a three-dimensional torus distributed switching topology. Scali AS of Oslo, Norway, is the integrator for the project. The Ruhr University system is a 128-processor cluster featuring AMD® AthlonTM MP 1600+ processors. With a Linpack performance of 235 GFlops, the system ranks 302 on the Top 500 Supercomputer list. The system was recently installed in the Theoretical Chemistry department at the University, where researchers are seeking to bridge the gap between chemistry and physics through understanding the structure, dynamics, and chemical reactions of complex molecular many-body systems. Integration was handled by MegWare of Chemnitz, Germany. The Dolphin WulfKit system is a standards-based high-speed interconnect used to cluster large numbers of servers creating a supercluster with performance levels comparable to other supercomputers. These WulfKit-enabled superclusters are typically used in highly demanding parallel processing applications in business and research. These two new systems join other systems on the Top 500 list built with WulfKit including superclusters at Umea University (Sweden) and University of California, Santa Cruz, ranked 124 and 215 respectively.