Compaq delivers 100 GFlop/s Alpha Cluster to CSC and Helsinki University of TechnologyHelsinki 10 May 00 CSC is the Finnish Center for Scientific Computing, operated by the Ministry of Education. It offers mathematical modeling, computing and information services to university researchers. Researchers have at their disposal a cutting-edge computer environment maintained by CSC. It is accessed through the Funet network. Actually it operates two Top500 systems, a Cray T3E 750 with 236 processors and a peak performance of 177 GFlop/s and a SGI Origin 2000 (300 MHz) with 128 processors and a peak of nearly 77 GFlop/s. The latter machine was installed last year. The new cluster is based in Compaq AlphaServer processors and will be installed at the beginning of this summer. The three partners expect a lot of the cluster, as Kimmo Koski, Academy Professor at HUT said: "The supercluster we are building now offers computing power greatly needed for mathematics-intensive scientific applications, and it also offers an excellent platform for research and development in new computing technology." The supercluster will be used for simulations of material physics, molecular dynamics, computational fluid dynamics, and other computational applications in science and technology. CSC has done extensive research on the adaptability of Linux based PC clusters for parallel processing in mathematical modeling. In tests, performed last year, 32 processors were interconnected for computation-intensive tasks. They simulated call routing in cellular phone networks, air flows surrounding fighter planes, and 3D modeling of protein structure. The Laboratory of Computational Engineering at HUT has also studied the suitability of a smaller Linux-based cluster of 16 Alpha processors for parallel computing tasks associated with the modeling of material structures. In addition, they have studied the influence of different interprocessor connection technologies on the computing capacity of the cluster. The supercluster system consists of 96 nodes, Compaq AlphaServer DS10 servers with new generation Alpha processors, a DS20E front end server (2 processors), and Myrinet and FastEthernet networks. Each computing node has 256 MB of memory, in total nearly 25 GB. The front end computer has 1 GB of memory. The operating system is Compaq Tru64 UNIX. The theoretical performance limit is over 100 Gflops (100 billion floating point operations per second).
[News on Advanced IT] [Calendar] [Analysis] [IT in Medicine] |
|