Aachen University of Technology (RWTH) buys 2 Tflop/s SUN systemAachen 05 February 2001 The RWTH, a leading technical university in Aachen, Germany, will install a 2 Tflop/s SUN supercomputer. This TOP500 class of machine will be the largest SUN supercomputer in the world. The 5 million euro machine, financed by the German federal government and the country of Northrine-Westfalia, will be installed in three phases, starting in April this year. SUN and RWTH will also enter into a cooperation with respect to computational fluid dynamics, one of the specialities at Aachen.
The RWTH (Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule Aachen) is one of the most important technical universities in Europe. It has 29.000 students and a yearly turnover of 500 million euro, from which 120 million are acquired through industry cooperations.
When completely installed in 2002, the new machine will have a peak performance of over 2 Tflop/s, which will bring it in the upper top50 region of the TOP500 list. The main memory installed will be 1 Tbyte at that stage. An on-line disk-space of 10 Tbyte will be installed to support the system
As usual these days for supercomputers, the machine will consist of a cluster of SMP-nodes coupled by a ccNUMA switch. The final configuration will consist of 768 new UltraSparcIII processors.
The machine will be installed in several stages. The first stage will be the installation of a 288 Gflop/s system, followed by an upgrade to 700 Gflop/s in October. In the Summer of 2002, the system will be enlarged to its final configuration and the fast processors will be installed.
SUN also expects to have the software components for the ccNUMA coupling of the SMP nodes ready in the beginning of 2002 to run the system
The largest computer users in Aachen are computational fluid dynamics, chemistry and structural mechanics. The research groups in these fields develop much of the software themselves. In addition, RWTH will install a number of commercially available scientific and engineering software packages. The extreme large memory of the computer, that can be accessed as "shared" memory, is important for the RWTH researchers. It will also allow them to do new research into visualisation and VR of fluid dynamics, for instance.
The versatility offered by this system should also increase the appeal of HPC in other fields.
The new SUN supercomputer will replace several RWTH compute servers, including a Fujitsu VPP300/8 vector computer.
The clustered SMP approach can serve a wider variety of users, including those from industry in a more flexible way.
The machine was acquired after an open tender according to the German system of procurement rules that exist for universities. The machine will cost 5 million euro, of which 50% is paid by the German Federal Government, the other 50% by the country of Northrine-Westfalia. The machine will not only be used by researchers at RWTH, but also by researchers from other universities in the context of a newly established computing cooperative between the computing centres of various universities in Northrine-Westfalia.
SUN will do more in Aachen than just install the machine. As part of a SUN-RWTH Cooperation, for instance, a focused development of Virtual Reality for CFD applications is being discussed. SUN will also use the Aachen system as a showcase for a variety of HPC applications.
More information can be found at the university's web site.
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