GAMING

Swiss DALCO announced that they have deployed a 160 dual-processor supercomputing cluster system at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH), one of the top research centers in the world. The system incorporates the Quadrics QsNetII fast interconnect together with a number of unique features provided by DALCO based around SuSE Linux and the Quadrics Resource Management System. The new cluster consists of a total 160 servers, each configured with dual AMD Opteron 250 processors with 2.4 GHz, 8 GB of main memory (shared by the two processors) and 120 GigaBytes of local temporary storage in each cluster node. Two separate management nodes provide a login service to the compute nodes. The compute nodes themselves run SuSE Linux 9.2 (64-bit) operating system. The system as a whole run the Quadrics Resource Management System and provides a robust operational environment for production codes. A File Server from DALCO with the latest Lustre/QsNet configuration will be installed in the near future. The system was fully integrated at DALCO's Supercomputing Center in Volketswil - a high-tech facility that is unique throughout Switzerland - for performance enhancements and testing. DALCO provided a number of key design features to maintain the operational reliability of the system; these included special memory modules, the DALCO Cluster Management Suite and the tight integration of Quadrics RMS with Platform LSF HPC." Jürgen Winkelmann, Head of System Services at ETH Zurich said "An essential aspect for choosing Quadrics QsNet as the high-speed interconnect for this system was reliability, performance and robustness for an production environment. Quadrics technology combines best performance in latency and bandwidth, a robust MPI production software environment and scheduling software for managing a large user base. As system integrator DALCO was chosen because they offered the best performance within the framework of our budget. " "Leading-edge technology is our passion and integrating Quadrics, the industry-leading high-performance cluster network for low-latency and high-bandwidth communication, into our solution translates into huge benefits for ETH, giving them the competitive edge for their research work," says Christian Dallmann, founder and CEO of DALCO. "Working with leading research organizations like ETH has demonstrated Quadrics products can now compete not only at the very high end of Supercomputing but also penetrate the capacity/capability environments too" said Cristoforo Romanelli, Managing Director of Quadrics Ltd "The business relationship with DALCO enables us to expand our reach into a challenging yet exciting marketplace and provides customers with the right combination of high quality technical solutions for their requirements".