Cray XC50

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The Cray XC50 supercomputer is the latest edition of the XC supercomputer line from computer manufacturer Cray , released in 2016 . Predecessors are the XC30 and Cray XC40 . The XC supercomputers use large-scale CPUs such as Intel Xeon (Broadwell) , Intel Xeon SP or GPUs such as Nvidia's Tesla P100 and standard DDR4 main memory as processing units . Two special features are decisive for the high performance of this series:

  • The enormous packing density achieved with “blades” that hold up to 8 CPUs in 2-socket nodes and 48 of which can be built into a “cabinet”. The cooling unit for the likewise enormous waste heat of up to 100 kW per cabinet is placed right next to the "Compute Cabinet".
  • The network called " Dragonfly ", which consists of an Aries routing / switching chip per 4 nodes and allows interconnection in a 2-level network tree (Aries "groups" are interconnected globally).

The “Aries” chips provide a routing bandwidth of 500 GBit / s and 40 routing ports per chip. This interconnection enables low latencies and high throughput due to the high bandwidth of the chips.

The main differences to the previous generation XC40 are the blades available; the basic architecture with cabinets, chassis and Dragonfly network remains the same.

The first installation of this supercomputer therefore also consisted of upgrading the Swiss computer called Piz Daint from a Cray XC30 by replacing the compute blades.

Specifications

Cabinet with 48 blades
  • The possible blade configurations:
    • from the XC40 a 4-node blade with E26xx-v4 2-CPU equipment
    • a CPU / GPU mix of: 4 nodes with 1 E26xx-v4 + 1 NVidia Tesla P100 This blade is advertised as having the highest energy efficiency (FLOPS / watt).
    • a CPU blade with 4 x 2 x Xeon SP nodes which then come to 384 CPUs per cabinet or 10,000 cores per cabinet (accordingly, platinum CPUs with 26 or 28 cores)
    • a Xeon Phi Blade with 4 x 1 CPU nodes
    • an air-cooled ARM CPU blade with 4 x 2 CPU nodes Cavium ThunderX2 CPUs
    • DataWarp: an SSD accelerator slot that increases the maximum data throughput of parallel file systems
  • three "chassis" with 2 x 8 slots each for blades can be built into one cabinet. Each chassis contains a backplane with the necessary connections for power supply and network connection. This also includes the connections between the 16 Aries chips in a chassis.
  • 3 chassis with 16 blades each installed, a total of 48 blades with 4 nodes each, makes 192 and up to 384 CPUs
  • Air (AC) or water cooling (LC) available
  • Power requirement: 103 kW per cabinet (maximum configuration)
  • A cooling cabinet is flanged on the side of each compute cabinet (air or water cooling)
  • 4 nodes are installed per blade (slot) and connected to the network via an Aries chip
  • an Aries chip realizes 500 GB / s switching bandwidth, 8 CPU ports and 40 network ports
  • The Aries chips are linked to a Dragonfly network interconnection: Due to the high number of switch ports per Aries chip, a two-level tree (Aries chips combined into a group, all groups directly interconnected globally) can be maintained. Each chassis provides 90 copper and 40 fiber optic connections to the outside

The currently largest installation of the XC50 is also the system called Piz Daint with around 36 cabinets and 6751 nodes as well as 1350 Aries router chips and 3rd place on the TOP500 supercomputer list from June 2017.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from July 30, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.cscs.ch
  2. ↑ https://www.heise.de/ix/meldung/Cray-XC50-Ein-Petaflops-Schrank-3485041.html
  3. ↑ http://www.cray.com/sites/default/files/resources/CrayXC_IntelXeonPDC.pdf
  4. ↑ http://www.cray.com/sites/default/files/Cray-XC50-NVIDIA-Tesla-P100-GPU-Accelerator-Blade.pdf
  5. ↑ http://www.cray.com/products/computing/xc-series?tab=technology
  6. ↑ http://www.cray.com/sites/default/files/resources/CrayXC_IntelXeonPhiPDC.pdf
  7. ↑ https://www.cray.com/products/computing/xc-series-overview?tab=technology
  8. ↑ http://www.cray.com/sites/default/files/resources/CrayXC40-DataWarp.pdf

Web links

http://www.cray.com/mnt/gfs/cray/sites/default/files/Cray-XC50-Product-Brief.pdf