With a theoretical processing speed of 60 teraflops, the new supercomputer at the National Supercomputer Centre at Linköping University will be one of the world's most powerful computer clusters. Go Virtual and HP, who were awarded the NSC contract jointly, will be in charge of both the hardware infrastructure and the installation work. The new supercomputer is being financed by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing section of the Swedish Research Council.
This autumn, the Swedish National Supercomputer Centre at Linköping University will introduce Sweden's most powerful supercomputer to date. The NSC's new computer building will house a total of 805 computing nodes, which will form a cluster that delivers a theoretical performance of 60 teraflops. In addition to being the most powerful supercomputer in Sweden, the new cluster will occupy a very high place on the list of the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers.
"With the new supercomputer, we'll be making a big leap forward compared to the computing power we have today. We'll be moving from 1.7 to 60 teraflops of theoretical processing speed on the primary resource we offer our academic clients," says NSC Director Sven Stafström. "The investment in this type of computing power — which was made possible by a grant from the SNIC division of the Swedish Science Council — is of considerable strategic importance, and part of our aim is to become one of Europe's leading computing centres. The new supercomputer will facilitate highly effective research in applied fields that develop new materials, new structures for improved aerodynamics and adhesiveness, and new electronic components, for example. It will also be used in basic research in fields such as chemistry and physics."
"This is a high-prestige project for Go Virtual and HP, as we're both involved and contributing the advanced know-how, capacity and resources needed to deliver this type of installation," says Peter Noring, business area manager at HP Sweden. "We're very excited indeed to be building a supercomputer in Sweden that's more powerful than anything in our part of the world"
When discussing superpower performance, speed is often measured in theoretical terms and expressed as the number of "flops", or floating-point operations per second. What this amounts to is simply an indication of how fast the computer should be able to perform calculations if all its capacity were used, right down to the last clock cycle. The claim that the NSC supercomputer can reach a processing speed of 60 teraflops is based on the ability of its processors to perform four floating-point operations each clock cycle. The top performance for each core is calculated by multiplying the clock frequency (MHz) of each processor by four. This number is then multiplied by the total number of cores — resulting in a theoretical value as high as 60 teraflops. To rank among the top 500 (www.top500.org), a special measurement program called Linpack is used to measure the real-world performance that the computing nodes actually deliver. What Linpack does is basically to solve a linear equation system.
"The most reliable estimate of the supercomputer's real-world performance shows that it should be able to reach about 40 teraflops, which means the NSC supercomputer ought to rank very high among the supercomputers in use today," says Ivar Ekström, head of sales at Go Virtual. "It's going to be an extraordinary installation — not just because the new computer building will be filled with a 20-metre-long, 2-metre-high computer rack, but also because of the research this type of infrastructure will make possible."
The hardware infrastructure consists of: