The two Cray CS-Storm cabinets for MeteoSwiss numerical weather predictions are named “Kesch” and “Es-cha” which are the names in German (Piz Kesch) and in Rumanch (Piz d’Es-cha) of a peak in the Albula Alps of the Rhaetian Alps in Switzerland. At 3’418 metres, it is the highest peak in the Albula Alps, Grisons.

The two new cabinets at CSCS are tightly packed. Each of  them consists of 12 hybrid computing nodes for a total of 96 graphic cards or 192 graphic processors (GPUs) and 24 conventional CPUs.

“Kesch” and “Es-cha” consist of identical Cray CS-Storm systems (production and failover), each comprising:

  • One water cooled rack (48U)     
  • Twelve hybrid compute nodes with:
    • 2 Intel Haswell E5-2690v3 2.6 GHz 12-core CPUs per node (total of 24 E5-2690v3 processors)
    • 256 GB 2133 MHz DDR4 memory per node (total of 3 TB)    
    • 8 NVIDIA® Tesla® K80 GPU devices per node (total of 192 GPUs)  
  • 3 Login nodes
  • 5 post-processing nodes Mellanox FDR InfiniBand interconnect Cray CLFS Lustre Storage
  • Cray Programming Environment