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10 Jun 2000 Live issue from the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar, June 2000Primeur Live! is published during major High-Performance Computing and Networking events in Europe
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The Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar is the main HPCN event in Europe. This year we publish two live issues from the event:
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Since 1992, Engineer Matthias Nethe is working as a systems analyst at the computer division of the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). Ing. Nethe was invited at Supercomputer 2000 to highlight the supercomputing resources at ECMWF in general and of the recently acquired Fujitsu vector parallel processor VPP5000 in particular. This machine is actively being used in the centre's Integrated Forecasting System (IFS). Ing. Nethe equally presented some valuable information on ECMWF's plans for upgrading its high-performance computing facilities in 2000, as well as on the performance figures for runs of the IFS T213L19 benchmark on a variety of computing platforms, including the VPP5000.
As much as 19 vendors, hardware, software, middleware, networking and storage presented their actual products. The highlights are listed here. From SuSe presenting their cluster Linux to Burton Smith painting the future of Cray Inc. from Qompaq presenting their latest supercomputer to Pallas presenting a new code-coupling packages.
Well, the Mannheim Supercomputer Conference has just celebrated its 15 years of life as Uwe Harms said in his 'semi-serious' speech, it goes back to the SUPRENUM times (who among the readers reminds this German designed and assembled Parallel Computer based on Motorola off-the-shelf processors, aborted shortly after its birth?) Incidentally, Uwe Harms pointed out the fact that the new,efficient and good looking Rosen Garten Kongress Center in Mannheim was selected as the venue of the Conference (instead of the old University) also because of the quality of the toilet paper: an unusual perspective, anybody has ever thought of writing a sort of 'Guide Michelin' of the Conference Centers Rest-Rooms? It might be an interesting reading.
The Unix-NT debate has been settled a year ago: NT just was not good enough for the very demanding high-end server market and parallel computing market. The Linux-NT debate is getting heated up however. Linux is attacking NT right in his own market: PC, workstations and smaller servers. Cluster computers are almost all Linux. There are two examples of large NT-clusters that made it to the recent June 2000 TOP500 list. Are these just one-of-a-kind efforts (like the number one in the TOP500) or is NT cluster-ready? Markus Fisher compared Linux with NT for cluster computing at the Mannheim Supercomputer Conference. From his talk one can conclude there is more in NT that is useful for cluster processing than most people realise, but overall, Linux is the better choice.
Dr. Matthias Brehm from the Leibniz Computing Center in Munich offered the Supercomputer 2000 participants an overview of the features and qualities, provided by the centre's recently installed Hitachi SR8000-F1, a 112-node system with a peak performance of 1.3 Teraflops. This machine probably is the fastest computer in Europe at the moment. The innovative architectural concepts and the advanced configuration allow the Leibniz researchers to automatically pseudovectorise or parallelise typical applications, in order to produce well-performing code. Dr. Brehm assessed the trade-offs for the use and combination of the different levels of parallelism, such as pseudo- vectorisation, shared memory with threading, and distributed memory with message passing (MPI.
The ETH Zuerich has installed a large Linux cluster that will be expanded later this month to 500 processors, 250 Gbyte of memory and 2 Tbyte of data. Because the machine is worth more that 1.5 million Swiss Francs, European regulations require an open tender that has to adhere to strict rules. So who won this tender? One of the big supercomputer companies you would assume. Not so, a small Swiss company Dalco employing 8 people but with a yearly turnover in the 10 million Franc range, solved the legal issues, the technical problems, convinced the ETH they could do the job, and offered the lowest price. Hence the cluster, called Asgard, was installed by the company of Christian and Francois Dallman. The cluster runs Linux, provided by SuSe which has a number of additional tools for running a cluster and supporting parallel programmes.
At the University of Wuppertal a cluster system has been installed called ALiCE. It is a Linux cluster based on Alpha chips with fast Myrinet connection. After an upgrade in July this year, ALiCE will consist of 128 processors and have a peak of 150 Gflop/s. The machine will be used for physics applications, including QCD. Price/performance for a QCD programme is estimated at 35 euro per Mflop/s performance. Thomas Lippert from the University of Wuppertal did present the first experiences with the machine at Supercomputer 2000 conference in Mannheim.
At the Mannheim supercomputer conference, NEC presented upgrade plans for the current SX-5 supercomputer increasing the maximum overall performance to 5 Tflop/s. The clock cycle of the SX-5 will change from 250 MHz to 312.5 MHz. There are also improvements to the vector processor.
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© 2000, Genias Benelux