|
Another example of Tyan's Dual AMD technology powering some of the most powerful computers in the world!
University of Heidelberg, Germany
The Heidelberg High-Performance Cluster, February 28, 2002 -
(translated from German)
The Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (http://www.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de) of the University of
Heidelberg, has decided to install a high-performance PC cluster. The computer will be used by groups in particular in the basis research of mathematics, computer science, bio computer science and chemistry for
extensive simulations.
The IWR parallel high-performance computer was installed at the beginning of this year and consists of 512 AMD Athlon MP processors, two of them are placed into one computing node. These
processors have frequencies of 1.4GHz and reach a theoretical maximum performance of 2.4 billion floating point operations per second (Gflops).
The new Tyan Tiger MPX S2466
mainboard is used, containing the AMD-760 MPX chipset, which realizes high I/O performance with the 64-bit 66MHz PCI bus.
The total system indicates a theoretical peak performance of more than 1.4 Teraflops,
which well exceeds even all present installed Myrinet PC cluster in the USA. First performance measurements by using the well known Linpack Benchmark show an extraordinary performance of 825 Gflops, which would place
this supercomputer in 24th postion as of last November on the list of the Top 500 most powerful computers in the world.
The interconnections of the computing nodes are realized via the high-speed network
Myrinet2000. This network indicates a point-to-point throughput of 2 Gigabit per second between two computing nodes. The system has 256 gigabytes of distributed memory, the major portion available for calculations. The
system costs of 1.3 Mio EURO (~ 1.15 Mio USD) are comparatively low, which becomes possible by a consistent use of standard components available in the PC market ('commodity, off-the-shelf'), as well as use of cluster
computing knowledge.
Basis for cluster computing is the operating system Linux, the open Unix system for the PC, which was developed by the Finnish computer science student Linus Torvalds. Additionally, the
cluster system Score. developed in Japan, will be used. Further necessary software tools are taken from the area of the worldwide Linux community and adapted on the special needs of the supercomputer in order to allow a
complete control of system resources.
Wolfgang Hafemann 2/2002.
|
