With “Piz Daint” CSCS triples its computing power and takes the first step towards petaflop computing
With a new supercomputer named "Piz Daint" CSCS triples the computing resources made available to Swiss researchers. Piz Daint is the first and largest Cray XC30 supercomputer installed worldwide. Its procurement and installation marks an important milestone in the implementation of the national high performance supercomputing strategy. The supercomputer will be extended in the next months with GPU-accelerators making it possible for the first time in Switzerland to exceed the petaflop frontier.
March 20, 2013
- A system engineer working on the supercomputer Piz Daint
CSCS takes another important step in the implementation of the Swiss high performance computing and networking (HPCN) initiative, which is coordinated by the ETH Board. A Cray XC30 supercomputer has been installed at CSCS and will become available to Swiss researchers in April. The next generation supercomputer has a peak performance of 750 Teraflops, which means that it can handle 750 trillion (750'000'000'000'000) mathematical operations in just one second. Following tradition CSCS has named the new supercomputer after a Swiss mountain, choosing "Piz Daint" this time, which is a prominent peak in Grisons that overlooks the Fuorn pass.
Although Piz Daint is made up of only 12 cabinets, it almost doubles the computing power provided by the current flagship computer, a 20 cabinet Cray XE6 (Monte Rosa). The latter was installed in 2009 already, but it will remain available to the scientific user community for some time to come.
Piz Daint was assembled in December and has undergone thorough testing and fine-tuning since then before it is now being made available to researchers. It is the largest of the new generation supercomputers worldwide that has recently been installed by Cray. Technically, it is based on latest generation Intel Xeon E5 processors for a total of 36'096 compute cores. The internal communication network groups processors into 2256 nodes, and it has been completely redesigned to enhance scalability of scientific applications. The benefit is that more compute cores can be used in parallel without sacrificing efficiency, thus allowing for larger and more complex scientific problems to be addressed in reasonable turnaround times. Compared to Monte Rosa, the machine cooling system has been improved as well, and this cuts overall operating costs.
- Back-view of the supercomputer Piz Daint
With the launch of the new supercomputer, CSCS announced together with Cray and NVIDIA an upgrade of Piz Daint to include NVIDIA® Tesla® K20X GPU accelerators. CSCS will be the first customer to receive a Cray XC30 supercomputer with NVIDIA GPUs. Such GPGPUs can increase the overall performance significantly and at much lower energy cost than traditional processors. Scientific computer programs require adaptation so that they can benefit from the processing power of GPGPUs, however, a number of applications used by the CSCS scientific community has already been made fit for this. Once the expansion is completed, the Centre’s Cray XC30 system will be the first petaflop scale supercomputer in Switzerland. The upgraded system is expected to be put into production in 2014.
Thomas Schulthess, Director of CSCS, comments on the installation of the new supercomputer, "A great team effort at the beginning of 2013 allowed us to get Piz Daint running in just 3 months, and make one of the most advanced supercomputers in the world available to Swiss researchers. I am very happy about this remarkable achievement, which has followed a very intense year of 2012 that saw the completion and the move into our new computer center in Lugano. The new system will enable researchers to solve ever more complex problems, be it in the search for new materials, in the prediction of climate changes, or in other disciplines. With the planned GPU acceleration, the application performance and the energy efficiency of our simulations will improve significantly. We are very excited about the collaborative development of a truly general purpose hybrid multi-core system with Cray.”