SARA supercomputing seminar organised for the 18th organised timeAmsterdam 13 December 2001 Since 1984, SARA, a Dutch academic supercomputing centre is organising a supercomputer user seminar. This year it attracted some 100 participants. Although the computing power installed has changed considerably, the largest machine is currently a 1024 processor SGI Origin, with processors that in performance come close to the first 1984 supercomputer: a Cyber 205. The supercomputer seminar format, however, did not change over time. This year, Bert van Corler reported on the experience with the supercomputers during the past years. Teras, the 1024 processor SGI Origin, experienced hardware problems, which did not enable it to perform as one supercomputer. Hence each half is presented in the TOP500 (on position 76 and 77) whilst the whole machine would probably have been found around place 25. Latest SARA acquisition is the first IBM Itanium cluster in Europe, which is just being unwrapped.
According to Bert van Corler, most of the problems with the Origin now seem to be solved. The average load during the past month was 56% of theoretical peak. The number of very large jobs, for which the machine is very well suited, is growing. Another big supercomputer at SARA is an IBM RS/6000 SP. This machine is very stable, with a down time of 2%. Last month's average load was 45% of peak. The machine, currently with 216 Gflop/s peak, will be upgraded in 1Q 2001 with 2 x 32 processors. This will be the latest IBM p690 processors. In 3Q 2002, all the other processors will be replaced, bringing the machine's peak to close to a Tflop/s. SARA has several cluster computers installed too. The largest is a Beowulf cluster of the University of Amsterdam. It is a 96% Gflop/s peak, 3 x 40 AMD Athlon processor machine.
The latest acquisition is a IBM Itanium cluster, the first in Europe. It is co-financed by the University of Amsterdam and has two nodes with each 4 Itanium processors. Each processor has 2 Gbytes of memory. In networking, SARA is concentrating on high-speed connection, for instance thorugh participation in GigaPort, and by being one of the access points in Starlight, that connects Amsterdam with Chicago with an high-speed optical link. Another activity is large storage, with exploration of SAN techniques, and as part of the CERN led DataGRID project. In support of supercomputer users, SARA takes a traditional approach, there is documentation, and MPI/OpenMP courses, and there is a programme to assist users in parallelisation. The latter can be done as part of an NCF funded grants programme, for Dutch academic users that is. The Cave is still the major visualisation tool at SARA. The centre is one of the first that did buy the vGEO data visualisation software that enabled easy entry of scientific data and easy walk though facilities. As a last item, Bert van Corler did mention that the SARA web site will be upgraded early next year.
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