Swedish National Supercomputer Centre builds 200 node supercomputerLinkoping 18 November 2002 The Swedish National Supercomputer Centre (NSC), located at Linkoping University, Sweden, has built a new cluster named "Monolith." At 200 nodes, it is the largest supercomputer in Sweden. Each node features two Intel Xeon processors at 2.2 GHz and is interconnected with the WulfKit3 system provided by Dolphin Interconnect Solutions. The system ranks 51st on the 20th Top 500 Supercomputers List announced last Friday and has a measured LinPack performance of 960 GFlops.
The 200 nodes in the cluster, also known as a Beowulf cluster, are
interconnected in a 5x5x8 torus topology, or logical cube, using one WulfKit3
card in each node. WulfKit3 is based on the scalable coherent interface (SCI)
standard, which accounts for the very high bandwidth, low-latency interconnect
performance. WulfKit3 is a combination of a PCI SCI Adapter Card developed by
Dolphin, and a powerful message-passing interface (MPI) implementation developed
by Scali (Oslo, Norway). Very large clusters can be built and managed using
WulfKit3.
According to Matts Karlsson of NSC "this new cluster is a substantial addition
to NSC's computing facilities." Monolith joins several other NSC computers,
including a Cray T3E with 272 processors, a SGI 3800 with 128 processors, a SGI
2000 with 48 processors, and three SGI Onyx2 systems with a total of 36
processors, in addition to several smaller clusters.
The second largest Sweden-based cluster employing WulfKit3 interconnect
technology was installed earlier this year at the High-Performance Computing
Center North (HPC2N), located at Umea University. That system consists of 120
dual-processor nodes and is ranked 124th on the Top 500 Supercomputer list.
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