Swiss National Supercomputing Center

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Swiss National Supercomputing Center CSCS
logo
founding 1991
place Lugano , Switzerland
management Thomas Schulthess (Director)
Employee 51
Annual budget CHF 24.3 million
Website www.cscs.ch

The Swiss National Supercomputing Center ( Centro Svizzero di Calcolo Scientifico , CSCS ) is the National Supercomputing Center of Switzerland . It was founded in Manno TI in 1991 . In March 2012 the CSCS moved to a new location in Lugano- Cornaredo.

With around 50 employees, the CSCS primarily serves as a so-called National User Lab. Research applications are evaluated in a competitive process and the best are funded through free access to the national high-performance computer . It also operates dedicated supercomputer systems for research projects and mandates of national interest, such as weather forecasting . It is the national competence center for high-performance computing and serves as a technology platform for computer-aided research in Switzerland. The data center is an autonomous unit of the ETH Zurich and works closely with the local University of Italian Switzerland (USI).

building

The office building of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center CSCS with part of the computer building on the left edge of the picture

The building in Lugano-Cornaredo has a pillar-free machine room area of ​​2000 m² and can be operated with an electrical output of up to 20 megawatts. To cool the computers, water from Lake Lugano is pumped from a depth of 45 m over a distance of 2.8 km to the data center. This means that only very little energy is required for cooling and the data center achieves a particularly high level of energy efficiency with a PUE <1.25.

Supercomputers

The supercomputer procurements of the CSCS can be divided into two phases: In the first phase, from 1991 to 2001, tried and tested technology was procured in order to give users the easiest possible access to the data center services. At the center of this strategy was the SX vector architecture from the manufacturer NEC .

In 2002, with the acquisition of a computer of the type IBM SP4, a massively parallel computer in a cluster architecture was procured as a production system for the first time. In 2005, the second phase was ushered in with the procurement of the first Cray XT3 computer, a massively parallel computer architecture. Since then, the data center has procured new computer architectures at an early stage, if possible before they are a generally available product.

Current computer systems

Model - computer name CPU type Number of processors Commissioning (last upgrade ) Peak Performance ( Tflop / s ) use
Cray CS-Storm - Kesch + Escha Intel Haswell E5-2690v3 12-core 2.6 GHz and NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPU 24 CPUs & 192 GPUs 2016 n / A Weather forecast ( MeteoSwiss )
Hewlett-Packard - Euler (2) Intel Xeon E5-2697v2 12C 2.7GHz 416 nodes (17664 processor cores ) May 2014 381,542 University research ETH
Cray XC50 - Piz Daint Intel Xeon E5-2690v3 12C 2.6 GHz 30146 (361760 processor cores ; 723520 hardware threads ) November 2016 25326.3 Research (especially simulations )
Cray XE6 - Monte Lema AMD Opteron (K10) 12-core 2.1 GHz 336 (4032 processor cores ) April 2012 33.87 Weather forecast ( MeteoSwiss )
Cray XE6 - Albis AMD Opteron (K10) 12-core 2.1 GHz 144 (1728 processor cores ) April 2012 14.52 Weather forecast ( MeteoSwiss )
Cray XK7 - Tödi AMD Bulldozer Opteron 16-core 2.1 GHz and Nvidia Tesla K20x GPU 272 (4352 processor cores ) + 272 graphics processors October 2011 (October 2012) 393.00 Research (especially simulations )
Cray XMT Next Generation - Matterhorn Cray Threadstorm 64 (8192 kernel threads ) June 2011 n / A Research (especially analysis of unstructured data )
Cray XE6 - Monte Rosa AMD Bulldozer Opteron 16-core 2.1 GHz 2992 (47872 processor cores ) May 2009 (November 2011) 402.12 Research (especially simulations )
Computer cluster (various manufacturers) - Phoenix Intel Sandy Bridge 2.6 GHz and AMD 16-core Opteron 2.1 GHz 82 (736 processor cores ) October 2007 (May 2012) 13.32 Computing Grid of the CERN LHC

Former calculators

Model - computer name CPU type Number of processors Operating time Peak Performance ( Tflop / s ) use
Cray XT4 - La Dole AMD Opteron (K10) quadcore 2.3 GHz 160 (640 processor cores ) May 2007 - June 2012 5.88 Weather forecast ( MeteoSwiss )
Cray XT4 - Piz Buin AMD Opteron (K10) quadcore 2.3 GHz 264 (1056 processor cores ) May 2007 - June 2012 9.71 Weather forecast ( MeteoSwiss )
IBM P5 p575 - Mont Blanc IBM Power 5 1.5 GHz 768 October 2006 to January 2010 4.6 Research (especially simulations )
Cray XT3 - Piz Palü AMD Opteron (K9) dual-core 2.6 GHz 1664 (3328 processor cores ) June 2005 to April 2009 17.31 Research (especially simulations )
IBM P4 p690 - MPP IBM Power Power4 1.3 GHz 256 2002 to 2006 1.33 Research (especially simulations )
NEC Corporation SX5 - Prometeo NEC SX-5 vector processor 16 1999 to 2007 0.128 Research (especially simulations ) and weather forecast ( MeteoSwiss )
NEC Corporation SX4 - Gottardo NEC SX-4 vector processor 16 1995 to 2004 0.032 Research (especially simulations )
NEC Corporation SX3 - Adula NEC SX-3 vector processor 2 1992 to 1995 0.0128 Research (especially simulations )

The Cray XT3 “Piz Palü” and the Cray XT4 “Piz Buin” are now in the “Enter” museum .

National Supercomputing Service

The computers of the National User Lab are mainly used by Swiss universities and research institutions located in Switzerland (especially Paul Scherrer Institute , CERN ) for their research. In 2011, around 177 million computing hours were allocated to 80 research projects with around 700 users. Almost 2/3 of the usage fell on the four universities ETH Zurich , University of Zurich , University of Basel and EPFL . Regarding the fields of application, about 2/3 of the computing time was used for research in the fields of chemistry , physics , earth and environmental sciences and nanosciences . Molecular dynamics methods play a major role in the various applications on the CSCS computers .

  • Distribution of the use of the CSCS supercomputers by research area in 2011

  • Distribution of the use of the CSCS supercomputers by research institution in 2011

Dedicated services

In addition to the computers of the National User Lab, the CSCS operates dedicated computers for strategic large-scale research projects and for tasks of national interest. The numerical weather models of MeteoSwiss have been calculated at the CSCS since 2000 . In January 2008, the first operational high-resolution weather model in Europe was put into operation on a massively parallel computer at the CSCS. At the CSCS, the Swiss computer cluster for the computing grid of the CERN Large Hadron Collider accelerator is also doing its job.

As an additional service, the CSCS provides data storage services for the Swiss systems biology initiative SystemsX and for the Center for Climate Modeling C2SM at ETH Zurich .

Research and Development

To support the further development of its supercomputer services, the CSCS evaluates technologies relevant for supercomputing in the sense of technology scouting and publishes the results online as white papers .

In 2009, the CSCS and the University of Italian Switzerland launched the HP2C platform with the aim of preparing scientific codes from Swiss researchers for future supercomputer architectures.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ ETH History: Swiss Scientific Computing Center, Manno (CSCS) . Retrieved August 13, 2012
  2. ↑ CSCS moves into new computer center in Lugano . CSCS News of March 12, 2012. Retrieved August 9, 2012
  3. ↑ Factsheet: CSCS - driving innovation in computational research in Switzerland . Retrieved August 9, 2012
  4. ↑ Factsheet: Innovative new building for CSCS in Lugano (PDF). Retrieved August 9, 2012
  5. ↑ Swiss Supercomputing Center delivers scientific excellence on NEC SX-5 . Interview from July 20, 2000. Retrieved August 13, 2012
  6. ↑ IBM selected to build Switzerland's largest supercomputer . Press release dated February 26, 2002. Accessed August 13, 2012
  7. ↑ Red Storm Over Switzerland: CSCS Will Be First in Europe to Make New Cray XT3 System Available for Science . Press release April 5, 2005. Retrieved August 13, 2012
  8. ^ First Cray XE6 supercomputer installed at CSCS . CSCS News of July 28, 2010. Retrieved August 13, 2012
  9. ^ Swiss National Supercomputing Center Orders First Next-Generation Cray XMT Supercomputers . Press release of February 28, 2011. Accessed August 13, 2012
  10. ↑ AMD Ships First "Bulldozer" Processors to CSCS and other High End Installations . HPC-CH blog entry from September 9, 2011. Retrieved on August 13, 2012
  11. ↑ https://www.ethz.ch/de/news-und-veranstaltungen/eth-news/news/2014/05/euler-mehr-power-fuer-die-forschung.html
  12. ↑ http://top500.org/system/178389
  13. ↑ Piz Daint - Cray XC50, Xeon E5-2690v3 12C 2.6GHz, Aries interconnect, NVIDIA Tesla P100 | TOP500 supercomputer sites. Retrieved November 17, 2017 .
  14. ↑ https://www.hpc-ch.org/a-new-home-for-palu-the-enter-museum-for-computer/
  15. ↑ Annual Report 2011
  16. ^ New supercomputer "Buin" inaugurated at CSCS - Quantum leap in weather forecasting . Press release of September 17, 2007. Accessed August 13, 2012.
  17. ↑ Factsheet: Supercomputing - a key to greater competitiveness . Communication from the ETH Board. Accessed August 13, 2012.

Coordinates: 46 ° 1 '28.8 "  N , 8 ° 57' 36.2"  E ; CH1903:  seven hundred and seventeen thousand eight hundred and ten  /  98156