GAMING

Swiss DALCO, one of the leading companies for high performance computing systems in Europe, has been commissioned by SAUBER PETRONAS - the Swiss Formula 1 team - to design and engineer a custom build Supercomputer 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 project is valued at around five million Swiss Francs or four million US Dollars. The system will be operational shortly. DALCO is cooperating with key technology partner on this project. AMD is providing the 64-bit Opteron processors; - Myricom the market-leading high-performance cluster network - provides Myrinet for low-latency and high-bandwidth communication among processors, Enterasys delivers the single backplane Gigabit infrastructure and Hitachi the storage technology. Fluent is providing 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 application. "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 45% 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", adds François Dallmann, lead Engineer at DALCO. Initially, the cluster will consist of 530 AMD Opteron 248 64-bit processors, 1'086 GBytes of physical memory and more than 21'000 GBytes of storage. The cluster will utilize SuSE 64-Bit Linux, integrated and optimized using DALCO's own cluster management software and best practices. 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