GAMING

Swiss DALCO, one of the leading companies for high performance computing systems in Europe, has successfully delivered the custom build Supercomputer "Albert" to SAUBER PETRONAS - the Swiss Formula 1 team - for their work in aerodynamics. This high performance Linux cluster will be the fastest in the entire Formula 1 but also one of the most powerful in the automotive industry worldwide. In Formula 1, aerodynamics is becoming increasingly important, requiring extensive compute power for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The Supercomputer was designed and custom build by DALCO for the demanding task to increase the available computing power by 30 times. The project is valued at around five million Swiss Francs or four and a half million US Dollars. DALCO cooperated with key technology partners on this project. AMD provided the 64-bit Opteron processors, Swissbit produced special memory modules according to DALCO specifications, Myricom provided Myrinet the market-leading high-performance cluster network for low-latency and high-bandwidth communication among processors, Enterasys delivered the single backplane Gigabit infrastructure and Hitachi the storage technology. Fluent provided the key tool, the software for the computational fluid dynamics. Intensive performance tests with prototype systems were conducted by DALCO at there Cluster-Computing-Center in Volketswil. The tests which utilized various processor architectures and the latest versions of Fluent, qualified the AMD Opteron processor as the fastest and most well-suited processor for the ambitious task. "Our only criteria for selecting components, was the ability to significantly contribute to maximizing the performance of the CFD software", says Christian Dallmann, Founder and CEO of DALCO. "We made no compromises designing the system which ultimately led to a nearly 48% extra performance increase." "This additional performance boost was only possible because of our extensive know-how in this area and the distinctive selection of highest quality components. Some of the parts where even specially manufactured for us", adds François Dallmann, lead Engineer at DALCO. Thanks to the sophisticated design and the selection of the proper components "Albert" is 30 times faster than the forerunner. The cluster consists of 530 AMD Opteron 64-bit processors, 1'086 GBytes of physical memory and more than 11'000 GBytes of storage. The cluster will utilize SUSE 64-Bit Linux, integrated and optimized using DALCO's own cluster management software and best practices. "Albert" is capable of performing 2,332,000,000,000 calculations per second. The maximum data transfer rate between all the compute engines is 240 GBytes per second which corresponds to 400 CD's. "Albert" is the silicon equivalent of the SAUBER PETRONAS wind tunnel, offering huge capacity at high speed, to find split second advantages per lap. Background: DALCO, headquartered in Volketswil, Switzerland, are one of Europe's leading producers of cluster-based Linux solutions in the field of supercomputing and the leading supplier of Linux-based solutions in Switzerland. DALCO's product range encompasses Supercomputers, custom-configured servers and high-performance workstations as well as extensive SAN and NAS storage solutions all the way to high-availability, fault-tolerant systems. www.dalco.ch