News from Fujitsu Siemens Computer (FSC) and hpcLine StatusKarlsruhe 02 May 2001 Eric Schnepf and Peter Kirsch discussed news in the vector, the SMP and hpcLine arena. They listed new hpcLine customers and the application software development.
The vector computer VPP5000 at Research Centre Karlsruhe has been upgraded last week to 8 processors, each having 8 Gbyte of main memory. The total peak performance sums up to 76.8 GFlop/s. The "old" VPP300 is expected to run for another 7 months. The VPP5000 with four processors at AUDI AG is running constantly and fully loaded. The new SMP system, the PrimePower, can now have up to 128 processors, SPARC64 GP developed by Fujitsu's daughter HAL, which has a clock speed of 563 MHz. New SPARC64 based HPC servers are planned for 2002. The hpcLine was tested at different industrial sites for quality assurance and the replacement of existing servers. More ISVs are porting their software on this platform. The ParaStation was announced for this line. In the meantime more middleware is available, LSF for the job scheduling, VENUS for the administration, Tivoli as the system supervisor and NetBackup for the data backup. Schnepf noted that the productivity and usability of Linux clusters as CAE server has been proven in these industrial tests. Framatome, a joint venture of Framatome and Siemens Nuclear Power (KWU), has installed a second system. The first, April 2000, has 8 nodes, 16 Intel Pentium III 600 MHz, 8 GB RAM and 100 Mbit/s Ethernet. The second system has 16 nodes with 16 Intel Pentium III 866 MHz, 8 GB RAM and fast Ethernet. This machine is used for StarCD. Another application is the linear optimisation. BASF Ludwigshafen installed a 16 nodes system with 32 CPUs, Pentium III 800 MHz and Fast Ethernet for COMET and Fluent applications. TeraPort, a German Engineering Application Service Provider, installed 3 nodes with 3 CPUs, Pentium III 866 MHz, for the FEM code Permas, ST-ORM, Abaqus and PamCrash will follow in Q2 2001. Leica Microsystems Lithography in Jena uses its 16 nodes, 32 CPUs Pentium III 800 MHz with Fast Ethernet for the package CATS. The first hpcLine with the Myrinet2000 interconnect and the ParaStation software runs at Max-Planck-Institute for Metal Research in Stuttgart. It has 8 nodes, 16 CPUs Pentium III 1000 MHz. At CeBIT, FSC announced new twin modules for 2 compute nodes each with a height of 4 U and up to 3 disks/node, separate power supply and CD-ROM is available. A Pentium 4 based node with 2GB Rambus RDRAM is now available. In benchmark tests, FSC found a factor of up to 3 faster than Pentium III for fluid applications because of the higher memory bandwidth. Another topic is Itanium, probably FSC will use the rack-mounted version of the Celsius 880 with dual Itanium and 16 GB SDRAM. As interconnects Fast Ethernet, SCI Interconnect with 2D- and 3D-Torus topology from Scali and Myrinet 2000 interconnect are the options for the hpcLine. Since December 1998, this centre has the biggest hpcLine system with 96 nodes and 192 processors but old Pentium II with 450 MHz. As the processors are rather slow, they have been exchanged by FSC by the Intel Coppermine, Pentium III 850 MHz and 256 KB cache. ICT, FSC's partner, dismounted in two steps 48 boards at a time. They were rebuilt by FSC in the Augsburg plant. The performance improvements in average sum up to 60%, specific applications gained 250%.
Thus PC2 expects to enter the June Top500 list again.
Uwe Harms [News on Advanced IT] [Calendar] [Analysis] [IT in Medicine] |
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