Six German States buy one 5 Tflop/s supercomputer

According to Prof. dr. Alexander Reinefeld, director of the ZIB, the German Science Council who approved the project was very pleased to see several states coming together to try to solve the computing needs of their researchers.

Reineld explains that the machine will be distributed over two sites: On part will be in Berlin and the other In Hannover. The two parts will be connected by a dedicated connection with a throughput of 2.4 Gbit/s or more. That is not very much lower than when the machine would have been placed in one centre. On the other hand, the latency, 6-8 msec, is larger. In Germany, there is, however, already much experience with this type of "metacomputing" applications that run over several supercomputers at different cities, even different continents. One example is the Cactus code, which started as a code for supporting astrophysical applications, but now is also used for other types of applications. Also large chemistry code such as GAMESS-UK can run over the distributed constellation.

The operating of the machine will be transparent to the user. From each side, it will look like one big machine to which he can submit jobs to queues, that are different for the size of memory, computing time and priority, but not for Hannover or Berlin. According to Alexander Reinefeld, this poses a challenge to the vendors: "They just cannot get away with clustered resource management systems, but should offer us a system that really provides a single image resource to the users."

In a way the machine is like the ancient Roman god Janus: the god of gates and doors. On coins he is depicted with two heads: looking the same from each side.

The two computer centres are responsible for the day-to-day operation and maintenance of their parts of the machine. Which researcher will be allowed on the machine will be decided by a scientific Committee, that will look at the projects from a scientific and computational requirements point of view. Representatives from all six States will be present in the Commission.

It is likely that several universities and research centres in the north will install "baby-supercomputers" with an architecture that matches the new large machine. These baby-supers will be used to experiment and develop code for the big super.

The exact architecture of the machine has not yet be decided. It depends on the offers of the vendors. But in any case, it will probably consist of closely coupled SMP's of RISC or CISC processors.

Reinefeld said that early next year, the consortium will issue a Request-for-Proposals, as a first step in the formal European Tender process which is required in the European Union. It is expected that the process will be finished with the installation of the new machine late Autumn 2001.

Computer prices are, unfortunately, very dependent on the US dollar. Hence, it is a pity that the euro is not doing to well compared to the dollar. Basically, there is a linear dependency of the final size of the new machine on the euro-dollar exchange rate.

Later on the consortium is looking at submitting a proposal for even a larger proposal for a 10 Tflop/s machine in the 2004 timeframe and to become a Federal supercomputer centre, just like LRZ in Munich or the Von Neumann centre in Juelich. But first they want to show they can manage such a complex constellation of six states working together and a machine distributed over two sites.

For more information check in at, for instance, the ZIB web site.