INTERCONNECTS

By Uwe Harms -- The Tübingen based transtec AG builds in the to-order method individual hardware following the specific customer needs. All the servers, supercomputers and storage systems are produced in Germany - quality Made in Germany. By acquiring Dr. Koch Computertechnik AG it strength its power in Cluster computing. End of last year Transtec installed a Cluster at Boehringer Ingelheim. The peak performance is about 1.9 TeraFlop/s. Transtec installed the Cluster at Boehringer Ingelheim in Biberach, which is a global player in the pharmaceutical industry and is committed to the goal of discovering and developing products which represent high therapeutic value for patients, the physician and health care providers. Boehringer Ingelheim invested for its first class research and development for R & D expenditure in Prescription Medicines about 18.9 per cent of net sales in 2002. The Linux cluster transtec installed, consists of 4 front-end and 163 compute nodes. The peak performance of the 334 Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz processors sums up to 1.87 TeraFlop/s. The nodes are connected with Gigabit Ethernet, as the application is moderately parallel. It is the first cluster that exceeded the TeraFlop/s barrier. Transtec expects a rank in the Top 150 in the Top500 June list. The nodes are water cooled, a technique developed by Knuerr. Transtec's cluster software was specifically developed Boehringer Ingelheim. The whole system can efficiently partitioning into separate subcluster. In these one can run batch jobs and test new application and operating system software releases. Boehringer Ingelheim runs Red Hat Linux. The cluster can be booted over the net. Dr. Koch Computertechnik AG Dr. Koch Computertechnik has a long experience in cluster computing. They developed the well-known cluster Kepler at the University Tübingen. It was installed in summer 2000 and entered the November 2000 Top500 list and was ranked 215. In June 2001 it was number 250 and in November 2001 number 495. It consisted of 98 nodes, each equipped with two Intel Pentium III, 650 MHz, and 1 GByte RAM. The peak performance summed up to 127 GigaFlop/s and 96.2 GigaFlop/s Linpack performance. Dr. Koch sold about 40 clusters throughout Europe and was acquired by transtec AG in June 2003. In the meantime transtec has sold more than 100 clusters including the Dr. Koch ones. Intel Cluster at University Erlangen In summer 2003 the Regional Computer Centre of the University Erlangen (RRZE) installed a Linux Cluster with 73 dual Intel Xeon nodes, 2.66 GHz and 3 front-end nodes with a peak performance of 780 GigaFlop/s, Rmax of 365 GigaFlop/s and rank 317 in the Top500 list. It was extended it to 85 nodes: 82 compute nodes, dual Xeon 2.66 GHz, 2 front-ends, having wit the same structure but 4 GB RAM. Now it has a peak performance of more than 900 GigaFlop/s. Transtec AG and White Papers On its Web Site Transtec presents some very interesting White Papers concerning High Performance Computing Clusters, High Availability Clusters and Storage Solutions. Some of them are available in English and French too. The structure of a HPC cluster is described with the basics, the operational modi - batch and parallel, the job management, the installation and networking variants, the front end, the optimal node architecture and housing. Some aspects concerning of the procurement and cluster applications will be discussed. http://www.Transtec.de Uwe Harms