System for big science
We have repeatedly introduced you to our developments for research centers of American universities - powerful and productive systems, thanks to which modern science has been able to develop a little faster. But the project, which will be discussed in this post, perhaps, can be called the grandest brainchild of Dell.
We will not prevaricate, claiming that the hero of today's story has no equal, but in our own portfolio this system has a special place. The demands of modern science are high. To go beyond the already known facts and move towards new discoveries, scientists need a powerful computing center — a supercomputer with exceptional characteristics. Such systems are necessary for modeling and subsequent analysis, for example, too large or too small objects - from chemical molecules to entire planets. With the help of supercomputers, you can calculate the time and place of a future earthquake, explore nanomaterials that convert sunlight into energy, understand how a tumor develops - in a word, get one step closer to solving the most pressing problems for humanity related to science. This supercomputer and became Stampede. This system, today, is one of the most powerful in the world. Dell created it together with Intel for the needs of the United States National Science Foundation (NSF). Datacenter is located on the territory of the University of Texas at Austin and occupied more than 2.5 square kilometers. To roughly imagine the scope of the project, it is worth mentioning some
numbers.
It is also worth mentioning that the total length of all cables connecting parts of the system exceeds 120 km! Of course, for servicing such a powerful supercomputer, a lot of energy is needed, and in this case we can talk about the power capacity of 4.5 MW. Thermal energy to ensure the functioning of the system is accumulated in special containers, totaling 4.5 million liters. All these figures clearly illustrate the scope with which Stampede was designed.
We will go deeper into the characteristics of the supercomputer. As already noted, the system has 160 racks with 6400 nodes Dell C8220. Each of them is controlled by two 2.7 GHz 8-core Intel E5 Sandy Bridge processors and a 61-core Intel Xeon Phi Knights Corner coprocessor connected via a PCIe x16 bus. 128 computer nodes are equipped with powerful NVIDIA graphic professors on the Kepler K20 architecture.
Each node is equipped with memory bars of 32 GB, another 8 GB provides a coprocessor. For specific purposes, the system has 16 nodes with an increased memory capacity of 1 TB each. It is also worth noting the high flexibility of Stampede: virtually every node has a free compartment into which you can insert an additional component - a memory, a second co-processor, a video accelerator, and so on.
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All system components are integrated into the InfiniBamd FDR network with bandwidth up to 56 Gbit / s. for each node. The width of the Stampede channel is commensurate with the total channel width of approximately 60 million households connected to the dedicated line. The high-performance Luster file system with a total volume of 14 PB provides a write speed of up to 150 GB / s. For example, a terabyte of data can be recorded in just eight seconds. Each node is also equipped with a local 250-gigabyte drive. As you can see, technically the Stampede system is ready for the most complex calculations and visual modeling of almost any objects. To date, this supercomputer has been used for more than a thousand research projects and has about 2000 active users. Building a system allowed the University of Texas to attract scientists from around the world and work on joint projects in biology, chemistry, energy, medicine, geophysics and even the humanities.
There are a lot of directions in which Stampede was simply an indispensable tool for calculation and analysis. Already, the computer is used in biology and biochemistry as a giant computational microscope to help find answers to fundamental questions, such as how new proteins are formed or how to obtain a new generation of biofuels. The power of the system is actively used to study oncological diseases and search for effective drugs, to determine the place of occurrence of those or natural disasters, to analyze the processes that occur inside our planet and beyond. The system helps in the study of new materials that may be involved in the industry, and, at the same time, opens up new dimensions in the knowledge of substances that have been known to us for a long time. For example, scientists are working on testing new water image algorithms that will help in the future to develop new drugs - and this, too, has been possible only thanks to Stampede. Even for linguists and music researchers, this system proved to be indispensable.
In short, the potential of Stampede will allow it for many years to be a unique tool to help move science and solve problems over which humanity has been beating for more than a dozen years. I want to believe that, thanks to a system created by Dell experts, scientists will make many important discoveries.
But for those who want to get acquainted with Stampede better, we can offer to visit an interactive site dedicated to this project.
We will not prevaricate, claiming that the hero of today's story has no equal, but in our own portfolio this system has a special place. The demands of modern science are high. To go beyond the already known facts and move towards new discoveries, scientists need a powerful computing center — a supercomputer with exceptional characteristics. Such systems are necessary for modeling and subsequent analysis, for example, too large or too small objects - from chemical molecules to entire planets. With the help of supercomputers, you can calculate the time and place of a future earthquake, explore nanomaterials that convert sunlight into energy, understand how a tumor develops - in a word, get one step closer to solving the most pressing problems for humanity related to science. This supercomputer and became Stampede. This system, today, is one of the most powerful in the world. Dell created it together with Intel for the needs of the United States National Science Foundation (NSF). Datacenter is located on the territory of the University of Texas at Austin and occupied more than 2.5 square kilometers. To roughly imagine the scope of the project, it is worth mentioning some
numbers.
- The Stampede system includes 6400 nodes located in 160 racks with a total weight of 227 tons.
- The peak performance of the supercomputer reaches about 10 petaflops, which is similar to carrying out about 10 quadrillion calculations per second.
- The total amount of RAM is 270 TB, and 14 PB of disk space is provided for data storage in the system.
It is also worth mentioning that the total length of all cables connecting parts of the system exceeds 120 km! Of course, for servicing such a powerful supercomputer, a lot of energy is needed, and in this case we can talk about the power capacity of 4.5 MW. Thermal energy to ensure the functioning of the system is accumulated in special containers, totaling 4.5 million liters. All these figures clearly illustrate the scope with which Stampede was designed.
We will go deeper into the characteristics of the supercomputer. As already noted, the system has 160 racks with 6400 nodes Dell C8220. Each of them is controlled by two 2.7 GHz 8-core Intel E5 Sandy Bridge processors and a 61-core Intel Xeon Phi Knights Corner coprocessor connected via a PCIe x16 bus. 128 computer nodes are equipped with powerful NVIDIA graphic professors on the Kepler K20 architecture.
Each node is equipped with memory bars of 32 GB, another 8 GB provides a coprocessor. For specific purposes, the system has 16 nodes with an increased memory capacity of 1 TB each. It is also worth noting the high flexibility of Stampede: virtually every node has a free compartment into which you can insert an additional component - a memory, a second co-processor, a video accelerator, and so on.
')
All system components are integrated into the InfiniBamd FDR network with bandwidth up to 56 Gbit / s. for each node. The width of the Stampede channel is commensurate with the total channel width of approximately 60 million households connected to the dedicated line. The high-performance Luster file system with a total volume of 14 PB provides a write speed of up to 150 GB / s. For example, a terabyte of data can be recorded in just eight seconds. Each node is also equipped with a local 250-gigabyte drive. As you can see, technically the Stampede system is ready for the most complex calculations and visual modeling of almost any objects. To date, this supercomputer has been used for more than a thousand research projects and has about 2000 active users. Building a system allowed the University of Texas to attract scientists from around the world and work on joint projects in biology, chemistry, energy, medicine, geophysics and even the humanities.
There are a lot of directions in which Stampede was simply an indispensable tool for calculation and analysis. Already, the computer is used in biology and biochemistry as a giant computational microscope to help find answers to fundamental questions, such as how new proteins are formed or how to obtain a new generation of biofuels. The power of the system is actively used to study oncological diseases and search for effective drugs, to determine the place of occurrence of those or natural disasters, to analyze the processes that occur inside our planet and beyond. The system helps in the study of new materials that may be involved in the industry, and, at the same time, opens up new dimensions in the knowledge of substances that have been known to us for a long time. For example, scientists are working on testing new water image algorithms that will help in the future to develop new drugs - and this, too, has been possible only thanks to Stampede. Even for linguists and music researchers, this system proved to be indispensable.
In short, the potential of Stampede will allow it for many years to be a unique tool to help move science and solve problems over which humanity has been beating for more than a dozen years. I want to believe that, thanks to a system created by Dell experts, scientists will make many important discoveries.
But for those who want to get acquainted with Stampede better, we can offer to visit an interactive site dedicated to this project.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/231315/
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