Fujitsu Siemens' hpcLine takes off

 Munich 04 Apr 00 In the status report of hpcLine, which was announced end of February 1999, Fujitsu Siemens reported about 11 new customers in academia and industrial research. This system is an integrated cluster of SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessor) nodes, each containing two off-the-shelf Intel Pentium III processors. They are connected via a high-speed system area network, mostly SCI (Scalable Coherent Interface) from Scali Norway. The operating system is optional, Linux or Solaris. For academia and research Fujitsu Siemens has a special offer, the Starter Kit: 8 nodes with 2 processors each - 16 Pentium III (650 MHz), 8x20 GByte IDE disks, 8x512 MByte SDRAM (ECC) main memory, SCI network, ScaMPI library, ScaCONF tools, Fast Ethernet adapters plus other hard- and software components for DM 130.000 (66.468 euro plus VAT.

This system can be extended to 32 processors (up to 800 MHz) within a rack, 2 GB memory per node and SCSI disks - a multi-rack configuration is possible. The largest system is a 192 processor cluster, installed in Paderborn at PC2. Other sites are for example: Max-Planck-Institute for Plasmaphysics, 4 nodes (8 CPUs), SCI; University Giessen upgraded to 16 nodes (32 CPUs), SCI; University Duesseldorf, 8 nodes, SCI; Institute for Civil Engineering and numerical mathematics, University Hannover, 8 nodes, SCI; Institute for Informatics FH Hannover, 8 nodes, SCI; DaimlerChrysler 16 nodes, SCI; GMD St. Augustin, 16 Celsius workstations (32 CPUs), SCI; Max-Delbrueck Center Berlin 16 nodes; BMW 8 nodes, SCI; KWU (Kraftwerksunion) 8 nodes.

Giessen has an interesting configuration, 8 nodes Pentium III (450 MHz) and 512 MB each, in the second step they got 4 nodes PIII (500 MHz), 512 MB and 4 nodes with 1024 MB memory.

Currently Intel processors up to 800 MHz PIII can be used, new Intel boards are under evaluation. Furtheron Fujitsu Siemens develops new rack modules, a rack middleplane enables reduction in cables and a cluster in the box with up to 64 CPUs/rack is possible.

Application Software

In the application software arena, Fujitsu Siemens is very active and looking for partners. However, some ISVs are still hesitating to port their application codes to the Linux platform. For sure, this will improve soon

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CFX-5 (Tascflow) from AEA, computational fluid dynamics, is running on hpcLine . The code is used in markets like mechanical engineering of turbomachinery, power generation, chemical and process industry. CFX-5 is parallelised and runs in heterogeneous Unix/NT environments.

Another example is MAGMASOFT, simulating convection and solidification in the casting process. For some weeks they use a 4 node hpcLine and found speedups of 4.1 on a 4 processor and 7.6 on a 8 processor system.

An other code is FEKO, electromagnetic compatibility. This code was developed at University Stuttgart and is distributed by EMSS from South-Africa. It is used in the automotive industry - the reason why BMW and DaimlerChrysler bought an hpcLine. The porting of Turbomol, a chemistry code from Karlsruhe, is planned. Fujitsu Siemens is in discussion with other software vendors, to optimise their code for hpcLine.

Further information can be found at: http://www.siemens.de/computer/hpc

 

Uwe Harms

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