Moscow, October 20, 2011. — RSC Group, Russia's and CIS leading full-cycle developer and integrator of next-generation supercomputing solutions based on Intel architecture and advanced liquid cooling, has been admitted as a member of PROSPECT (Promotion of Supercomputing Partnerships for European Competitiveness and Technology, www.prospect-hpc.eu/) at a working meeting of this open European association in Barcelona, Spain.
PROSPECT brings together Europe’s leading industry players and research organizations with the goal of promotion and advancing the technology and development of High Performance Computing (HPC). The European association has been established in 2007 and currently includes about 40 members from 9 countries (the United Kingdom, Germany, Israel, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland and Russia). Such companies and organizations as Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Forschungszentrum Jülich, Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum Stuttgart (HLRS), HP, IBM, Intel, Leibniz-Rechenzentrum (LRZ), Mellanox Technologies, Micron Semiconductors, Netherlands National Computing Foundation (NCF), Oracle, Supermicro, Edinburgh University, Heidelberg University etc. participate in the association.
"PROSPECT is pleased to welcome RSC as a new member of our association. We are delighted to have such a strong partner from Russia in the field of European HPC and are looking forward to a successful partnership." said Hugo R. Falter, COO of ParTec Cluster Competence Center, the administrator of PROSPECT.
RSC’s membership in PROSPECT is a logical and consistent step, which was acknowledged by unanimous vote of the members. This demonstrates recognition of the company’s innovative developments and advanced technologies at the reputable European level.
RSC Group once again justified its reputation of a technology leader by showing an innovative architecture RSC Tornado at the Europe’s leading industry event, International Supercomputer Conference (ISC) in Hamburg, June 2011. RSC Tornado is the world’s first energy efficient supercomputing solution with advanced liquid cooling for commercially off-the-shelf available standard server boards based on Intel® Xeon® processors. Those systems were initially designed for traditional systems with forced airflow cooling of electronic components. RSC Tornado architecture ensures flexible configuration of computing nodes with standard interfaces, simple assembly, high serviceability (simple replacement of RAM modules and RAM extension, as well as processor upgrades), and integration with any external products having standard PCI Express interfaces.
RSC Tornado benefits are highly valued by the Russian clients, so this innovative solution is actively used by RSC in its new projects. For example, it has been used to build a new supercomputer for Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology (MIPT) based on high-performance Intel® Xeon® 5680 Processor 3.33 GHz, which demonstrated the following unique features during it’s pilot phase :
• Simplicity and high reliability;
• Cost effectiveness;
• Energy efficiency. The system has a record Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of less than 1.2 (this is the ratio of total power consumption vs. power consumption of electronic components). This means that maximum 16.7 % of the system power consumption is used for cooling.
• Compact size and high density;
• High computing effectiveness ratio - more than 90 % in LINPACK benchmark;
• High scalability;
• Accelerator support (Intel MIC architecture).
Later this year the speed of the computing cluster in MIPT will be increased up to 30 TFLOPS (trillion floating point operations per second).
"Since its inception our team set the goal of developing innovative technologies, products and services that make performance, scalability and energy efficiency available for Russian and international users of high performance computing solutions. We hope that our experience and potential will facilitate the advancement of HPC industry and foster international cooperation in PROSPECT." said Alexander Moskovsky, Chief Executive Officer at RSC Technologies, a part of RSC Group.
