CSCS Installs NEC SX-5 Supercomputer

 Manno 07 Dec 99 ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) and NEC Corporation Tokyo signed a contract for the installation of a new-generation SX-5 supercomputer system early next year at CSCS, the Swiss Center for Scientific Computing in Manno (TI). The configuration will have 8 processors, 64 GBytes of memory and a total peak performance of 64 GFlops (64 billion floating point operations per second).

The new SX-5 installation will provide a significant technology upgrade as recommended by the recent international evaluation of CSCS under the guidance of Dr. Stephan Bieri, CEO of the ETH Council (ETH-Rat). The upgrade is supported by the ETH Council and in line with the needs of the distinguished scientific user community of CSCS, currently operating a NEC SX-4 supercomputer. The SX-5 system is expected to deliver an almost three-fold increase in computing performance, as well as an eight-fold increase in memory capacity.

With the installation of the previous-generation SX-4 in 1996, CSCS and NEC embarked on a joint program in user support, also known as the "SX-4 Task Force". This program found much appreciation among the prominent users and made significant contributions to computational science, being recognized also beyond Switzerland as a model for successful support in HPC (High-Performance Computing). The special focus on highest effective performance for real-life applications has drawn international attention.

Major projects supported by the SX-4 Task Force are among others in the fields of Meteorology and Climate Modeling (a recent example is the big international meteorological project MAP aimed at much more precise weather forecasts than today), CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics), Computational Chemistry, Materials Science and Physics.

In response to this positive experience, ETH Zurich and NEC have signed an agreement to continue this successful cooperation also for the new SX-5 system in order to maintain the outstanding support to the users of CSCS.

 

Ad Emmen

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