Chelyabinsk/Moscow, April 10, 2013. – Jack Dongarra, one of the leading worldwide HPC experts, has been visited in early April, 2013 a top supercomputer customer sites deployed by RSC Group, the Russian leading innovative HPC solutions builder – South Ural State University (SUSU, Chelyabinsk) and Joint Supercomputer Center of Russian Academy of Science (JSCC RAS, Moscow) in Russia. There are both the Europe’s largest projects with new Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors – first two such supercomputers outside of the USA being already ranked by Top500 and Green500 worldwide lists.
“Both SUSU and JSCC RAS are state of the art high performance computing centers with competent staff running the highly ranked Top500 and Green500 powerful and energy efficient supercomputers. The facilities both use RSC Tornado based systems with innovative liquid cooling and newest Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors which provide impressive high performance capabilities and energy efficient solutions to solve very demanding science research and engineering problems.”, said Jack Dongarra.
Mr. Dongarra has been very impressed by high level of energy efficiency and world record computing (up to 181 TFLOPS per rack) and power (up to 100 kW per rack) density while having a very small footprint because of RSC Tornado liquid cooling technology implemented in the those both Russian projects.
“This is a very simple and economical way to do it – in terms of the used space and power – which provides a good environment for the computer systems as well as for the people who take care of it. I see here a rather small room being equipped by a very powerful supercomputing system. I think this is a good sign of the well done engineering and planning have gone into construction of this computing facility.”, commented Jack Dongarra after his visit to one of the best Russian supercomputer centers.
RSC Group has been deployed in the end of 2012 a prototype of a 10 PFLOPS-range MVS-10P supercomputer at the Joint Supercomputer Center of the Russian Academy of Science. This system takes now 59th position in Top500 list in terms of the world’s most highly performing computing systems as well as 30th place in Green500 worldwide rating in terms of the energy efficiency.
This system based on RSC Tornado architecture with direct liquid cooling and has set the several local and worldwide records in different nominations. The prototype system with 523.8 TFLOPS peak performance has the Russia’s and CIS energy efficiency record level of more than 1,949 MFLOPS/W, which is 5.5 times increase comparing to the previous energy efficiency record for the region (also achieved by an RSC Tornado-based system with liquid cooling).
The use of an advanced liquid cooling system allowed to reach industry’s highest computing density of 181 TFLOPS per 80*80cm*42U rack, or 141 TFLOPS/m3, which is 3.8 times higher than the previous world record for х86 architectures. Such a high computing density is required for ExaFLOPS-range supercomputers, which will consist of hundreds of racks each consuming over 100kWatt of power. The unique power and performance density levels achieved by MVS-10P prototype system based on RSC Tornado architecture proves technical feasibility of building high-performance systems with required characteristics for ExaScale era.
The new JSCC RAS supercomputer with 208 nodes consists of 3,328 Intel® Xeon® E5-2690 processor cores and 25,376 Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor SE10X cores. Each node supports a large capacity of energy efficient RAM – 64 GB (DDR3-1600, low voltage green memory), which equals to 4 GB per each Intel Xeon core and 13 TB of RAM for the whole cluster. A high-performance interconnect is based on advanced FDR Infiniband technology (56 Gbps). This system is also equipped with a flexible power and energy management RSC ECOsystem technology which additionally decreases the total cost of ownership (TCO) by 25%.
Other project called as RSC Tornado SUSU supercomputer has been created at the supercomputing center of South Ural State University on the basis of existing infrastructure previously deployed by RSC. This is the Europe’s largest university supercomputing system with Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. The peak performance of this powerful system, which includes 192 computing nodes based on innovative RSC Tornado architecture with direct liquid cooling, is 236.8 TFLOPS. RSC Tornado SUSU supercomputer holds now 170th position in Top500 list and 40th place in Green500 rating.
Unique characteristics of RSC Tornado-based solutions
The new stage in development of innovative RSC Tornado architecture for energy efficient data centers and supercomputing systems allowed RSC Group’s specialists to implement world's first direct liquid cooling for widely available Intel® Xeon®-based standard server boards (from various manufacturers), initially designed for traditional systems with air cooling of electronic components, with the latest Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. This is the third generation of RSC’s energy-efficient solutions for High Performance Computing, cloud environments and data centers.
Powerful solutions with high computing density based on RSC Tornado architecture with direct liquid cooling are designed to solve various customers’ needs. The product line includes RSC DCmicro (16 to 64 nodes), RSC DCmini (64 to 256 nodes) and RSC Data Center (from 2 high dense racks up to dozens of PFLOPS).
Among unique features of RSC Tornado architecture and solutions there are the following:
• Up to 128 х86 servers in a standard 42U rack 80х80х200 cm;
• High-density blade server design based on widely available boards;
• Record-breaking energy efficiency. The system allows achieving an industry-leading Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of less than 1.06 (the ratio of total amount of power used by a computer data center facility to the power delivered to computing equipment.). This means that maximum 5.7% of the consumed energy by a datacenter will be used for the cooling of the system;
• Record-breaking computing effectiveness ratio — more than 96% for Intel Xeon E5-2690 processors in LINPACK benchmark (Intel® Turbo Boost Technology is always on, which provides for clock speed gain of up to 400 MHz in LINPACK);
• Removal of over 100 kW of power from each rack using RSC’s unique liquid cooling design;
• Possibility to use Intel's top-performing server processors with heat dissipation of 135W, e.g. Intel Xeon E5-2690 Processor (2.9 GHz, 8 cores) and the newest highest performing Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors;
• High peak performance – over 47 TFLOPS per rack based on Intel x86 architecture with AVX Instruction set and up to 181 TFLOPS with the use of Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors;
• High density – 74 TFLOPS per square meter (using Intel Xeon only) and 283 TFLOPS per sq. m (with Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors);
• High scalability – up to PFLOPS level (dozens of racks);
• Cost effectiveness – operating cost reduction by 60 percent (energy cost saving due to RSC solution operation);
• Compact size – multifold datacenter floor area reduction comparing to traditional air-cooled installations;
• Fully integrated software stack for High Performance Computing – RSC BasIS optimized for high performance computing.
