Several European Fujitsu Siemens VPP vector users upgraded their systems

Paderborn 04 Apr 00 The Fujitsu Siemens vector computer users reported their experiences during the SAVE users group meeting in Paderborn. There are several Fujitsu Siemens vector supers in Europe. There was specific interest for the first experiences with the new machine VPP5000. Research centre Karlsruhe, ECMWF, AUDI AG, Meteo France, Electricite de France and CEA (Commissariat Energie Atomic) presented their centres.

One of the centres with upgrade plans is the Research Centre Karlsruhe (FZK). In April 2000 a 4 processor VPP5000 with 32 GB memory, 38 GFlop/s and 72 GB internal disk and 288 GB RAID5 Noble disk will be installed. In spring next year it will be extended to 6 CPUs with 8 GB each and 2 CPUs with 16 GB each and 864 GB RAID. Then the performance sums up to about 77 GFlop/s. The old VPP300 will be used till end of May 2001. Beneath own codes FZK uses the computational fluid dynamics code CFX-4 from AEA. The reason for selecting the VPP5000 was the high processor speed. The centre measured a factor of 4 to 5 performance improvement on the VPP5000 with several application programs compared to the VPP300.

The biggest VPP site in Europe is ECMWF, the European Weather Forecast Centre. They use a VPP700 with 117, a VPP700E with 48, a VPP300 with 9 and another with 4 processors. The VPP700s have a utilisation of more than 80%. The VPP5000 was installed beginning of November 1999, 38 Processing Elements (PEs) - a peak performance of about 365 GFlop/s - with 4 GB memory per PE and about 2 TB of disk space. The VPP5000 passed 90-day operational acceptance on 16th February. In July 2000 the system will be expanded and will have a total of 100 PEs - 960 GFlop/s peak - and a disk space of more than 5 TB.

At AUDI AG a smaller VPP5000 with 4 processor complements the actual VPP300 with 16 PEs. A detailed report of this site with the application spectrum is in preparation.

Meteo France bought in October 1997 a VPP700 with 26 PEs. At October 4th, 1999, the rapid installation of the VPP5000 with 31 PEs took place, which allowed the first user tests on October 21 and the opening of the machine on November 8. The departure of the VPP700 took place end of March. Meteo France measured with their application a performance improvement of a factor of 4.4 compared to the VPP700. About 173 seconds the benchmark needed on the VPP5000/31, about 4202 seconds on the old Cray C98/8. The memory sums up to 208 GB, 21 PEs with 8 GB, 10 PEs with 4 GB and a total of 2 TB RAID.

Electricite de France bought a VPP5000 with 3 PEs and 4 GB memory per PE. It replaces a Cray C98. The installation started in January 2000, the production was moved to this machine, the Cray went off on March 31st.

Ian Godfrey from Fecit (Fujitsu European centre for Information Technology) mentioned that Fujitsu Siemens is co-operating with the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) software vendors like MSC.Software (Nastran, Marc), ESI with parallel Pamcrash and different CFD codes. In cooperation they parallelise and optimise the codes. They measured for example that a SGI 16 processor machine compares to one processor of the VPP5000.

Uwe Harms

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