Moscow, March 27, 2012. — Three energy efficient systems with liquid cooling created by RSC Group, Russia's and CIS leading full-cycle developer and integrator of next-generation supercomputing solutions, were included in a new edition of Top50 rating of most powerful supercomputers in CIS countries announced at PCT conference in Novosibirsk.
A supercomputer based on RSC Tornado architecture installed at South Ural State University (SUSU), Chelyabinsk, and listed in the rating for the second consecutive year, is on the 4th position in the updated Top50. The new computing clusters used to solve tasks in biomedicine, pharmacology and small-scale structures at I-SCALARE laboratory with Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and at the Main Computing Center (MCC) of the Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring (Roshydromet) took 20th and 22nd positions respectively.
"We are happy that the current edition of Top50 rating includes three supercomputer systems based on RSC Tornado with a total peak performance of about 200 TFLOPS. This shows again that RSC has chosen the right strategic course to develop and implement innovative technologies in combination with advanced liquid cooling for real-life supercomputing projects to solve urgent tasks faced by Russian clients and users of High Performance Computing solutions”, said Alexey Shmelev, chief executive officer, RCS Group.
RSC's largest supercomputing project has been implemented in SUSU, which has the status of research and science university (RSU). RSC created a supercomputer with the peak performance of 117 TFLOPS (trillion operations per second) on the basis of innovative RSC Tornado architecture with highly efficient liquid cooling and Intel® Xeon® processors for the university. This supercomputer occupied the 3rd position in Top50 rating of most powerful supercomputers in Russia and CIS countries in March, 2011. Additionally, it is currently on the 121st position in the world rating Top500 as of November 2011 (the highest position is 87th place in June 2011). According to Green500 world rating, it is the most energy efficient supercomputer in Russia and CIS countries (November, 2011). SUSU supercomputer center already completed more than 250 projects to perform scientific research and solve urgent tasks in industrial, economical and educational areas.
RSC specialists installed Russia’s largest computing cluster on the basis of Intel® Xeon® E5-2690 processors in Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. The cluster is used by the specialists of I-SCALARE laboratory to solve tasks in biomedicine, pharmacology and small-scale structures. The laboratory was created as a part of Russian government grant in MIPT and led by Vladimir Pantkovskiy, a globally renowned scientist and an employee of Intel Corporation. After completion of the 2nd upgrade phase, the peak performance of this system created on the basis of innovative RSC Tornado architecture reached 41.5 TFLOPS.
Installation and further modernization of an energy efficient cluster on the basis of innovative RSC Tornado architecture and Intel® Xeon® E5-2690 processors up to the peak performance level of 35 TFLOPS more than doubled the computing power of Roshydromet MCC. Roshydromet specialists use this supercomputer to further develop operational technologies in order to improve accuracy, shorten the lead time and increase refinement of weather forecasts.
RSC Tornado Architecture
The development of innovative RSC Tornado architecture for energy efficient data centers and super-computing complexes allowed RSC Group’s specialists to implement world's first advanced liquid cooling for widely available Intel® Xeon®-based standard server boards (by various manufacturers) initially designed for traditional systems with air cooling of electronic components. This is the second generation of RSC’s energy-efficient solutions for High Performance Computing, cloud environments and data centers.
Among unique features of RSC Tornado and solutions based on the architecture there are the following:
• 128 servers in a standard 42U 80х80 cm rack;
• Record-breaking energy efficiency. The system has an industry-record Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of less than 1.06 (this is the ratio of total power consumption vs. power consumption of electronic components). This means that maximum 5.7% of the consumed energy will be used for cooling of the system;
• Record-breaking computing effectiveness ratio — more than 92 % for previous generation Intel® Xeon® 5680 and the new Intel Xeon E5-2690 processors in LINPACK benchmark (Intel® Turbo Boost mode is always on, which provides for clock speed gain of up to 400 MHz);
• 65 kW of electric power per rack;
• Possibility to use Intel's best-performing server processors with heat dissipation of 135 W;
• High peak performance up to 47.5 TFLOPS per rack based on Intel x86 architecture with AVX Instruction Set;
• High density — 74 TFLOPS per square meter.
• High scalability — up to PFLOPS level (dozens of racks);
• Cost effectiveness – operating cost reduction by 60 percent (energy cost saving (in rubles) due to RSC solution operation);
• Compact size – multifold datacenter floor area reduction;
• Accelerator support.
Additionally, RSC specialists implemented a fully integrated software stack for High Performance Computing (НРС).
