ACADEMIA
University of Frankfurt Selects ClusterVision to Build 20,784 Processor Supercomputer
ClusterVision has been selected to deliver the new flagship supercomputer of the Goethe University's Hessian high-performance computer organisation (HHLR-GU). This supercomputer called "LOEWE-CSC" has 20,784 processor cores plus 772 GPGPU hardware accelerators, which adds up to a theoretical peak performance of 599 TeraFLOPs (599 trillion calculations per second) in double precision and 2259 TeraFLOPS in single precision. On today's TOP500 list of fastest computers in the world, LOEWE-CSC could rank amongst the top 15.
Scientists at the Goethe University and in the state of Hessen will be using LOEWE-CSC for a wide range of scientific research, ranging from theoretical physics and chemistry to life sciences and computer science. This research is supported amongst others by the Frankfurt Cluster of Excellence for Macromolecular Complexes (CEF-MC), the LOEWE Helmholtz International Centre (HIC) for FAIR, the LOEWE Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiKF), the Transregio SFB 49 Condensed Matter Systems with Variable Many-Body Interactions, the Frankfurt Bernstein Focus Neurotechnology DMSPiN, and the Hessian Quantum Chemistry Initiative.
"This supercomputer represents a new era for high-performance computing at the University of Frankfurt. The LOEWE-CSC supercomputer will allow us to run a large range of scientific applications at an unprecedented scale, but also at a ground-breaking performance-to-power-consumption ratio," said professor Volker Lindenstruth, Chair of HPC Architecture at the Goethe University. "We are pleased that ClusterVision has won this competitive procurement because they have an excellent reputation at the University of Frankfurt. The new system implements the most competitive balance between performance, energy consumption, space and cost."
The supercomputer will be built by ClusterVision using Bright Cluster Manager as the cluster management software, which is unique due to its built-in functionality for large and complex HPC clusters. At the heart of the cluster will be 386 units of 2U Supermicro GPU-optimised Twin servers with two hot-plug nodes each, 1544 AMD Opteron 12-core "Magny-Cours" CPUs, 772 ATI Radeon GPGPUs, and QDR Mellanox InfiniBand. The supercomputer will also have 420 TeraBytes of disk storage from Dell with an extremely fast, 10GB/s, parallel FhGFS filesystem from the Fraunhofer Institute ITWM in Kaiserslautern.