VISUALIZATION

By Uwe Harms, Harms-Supercomputing-Consulting -- Leibniz-Rechenzentrum (LRZ) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich has installed an upgrade to its Hitachi SR8000, increasing its memory capacity and performance by 50%. In addition to the SR8000, LRZ also runs an IBM 8-way Power-4 shared memory multiprocessor, a Linux Cluster, and a Fujitsu Siemens VPP700 vector supercomputer with 52 nodes. The latter has a peak performance of 114 GFlop/s and serves as the high performance platform for Bavarian universities and research activities. During the Christmas and New Year holiday period, the SR8000’s operation was interrupted and the machine shut down. Hitachi upgraded the SR8000 to the second phase of the procurement, conforming with the contractual requirements. In the first phase Hitachi installed an SR8000 with 112 SMP nodes, each node comprising eight processors working in shared memory mode. The peak performance of each node is 12 GFlop/s. In the second phase the vendor installed an additional 56 nodes, increasing the peak performance of the machine to 2,016 Gigaflop/second. Due to the measured LINPACK performance of 1.65 TFlop/s LRZ hopes to return to a ranking in the top 10 of the next Top500 list. The memory capacity of the SR8000 was expanded from 900 to 1300 GigaBytes. Now about 10 TeraBytes of disk space is available, compared to 7.4 before the upgrade. The hardware part of the upgrade work proceeded very quickly with the machine booting correctly immediately after the integration of the new nodes. Due to improvements in the operating system, only a few software problems are still present, so after the installation of a new operating system release, LRZ expects good stability also for the upgraded machine. On January 10, user operations were reinitiated. Currently, LRZ runs the 30 day acceptance test, until now without failures. Physically, the LRZ now runs Hitachi's biggest machine, the 168 compute nodes requiring four cabinet heads. The SR8000 at University of Tokyo contains only 144 nodes in three cabinet heads, however the processors run at a higher frequency resulting in a peak performance of 2.07 TFlop/s. Currently, about 60 projects from different application areas run on the Hitachi supercomputer: applied mathematics, astrophysics, biosciences, fluid dynamics, chemistry, geosciences, informatics and physics. The competence network(competence network for technical and scientific supercomputing in Bavaria, KONWIHR) has about 4.6 million Euro (more than 4 million US$) at its disposal for strategic improvement of software and algorithms for use in high performance computing. For further information please visit www.lrz.de ----- Copyright: Uwe Harms, Harms-Supercomputing-Consulting