HELICS I
The Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR) of the University of Heidelberg has installed a high-performance PC cluster. The computer is used by groups in particular in the basis research of mathematics, computer science, bio computer science and chemistry for extensive calculations and simulations.
The IWR parallel high-performance computer was installed at the beginning of 2002 and consists of 512 AMD Athlon MP processors, installed in 256 SMP computing nodes. The processors are running at a clock speed of 1.4GHz and reach a theoretical maximum performance of 2.4 billion floating point operations per second (Gflops). The total system indicates a theoretical peak performance of more than 1.4 Teraflops, which well exceeded even all installed Myrinet PC cluster in the world at the time of the installation. First performance measurements by using the well known Linpack Benchmark showed an extraordinary performance of 825 Gflops, which have placed this supercomputer in 35th position of the June 2002 list of the Top 500 most powerful computers in the world.
The interconnections of the computing nodes are realized via the high-speed network Myrinet2000. This network is characterized by a point-to-point throughput of 2 Gigabit per second between two computing nodes. The system has 512 gigabytes of distributed memory, the major part is available for calculations. The system costs of 1.3 Mio EURO are comparatively low, which becomes possible by a consistent use of standard components available in the PC market ('commodity off-the-shelf'). As base for this cluster computer Linux is used as operating system; HELICS is a Debian GNU/Linux installation. Additionally, the low level GM driver for the Myricom hardware is needed and mpich is used for parallel development. As batch system the OpenPBS derivative Torque is installed. On top of Torque the Moab scheduler, the successor of the famous Maui scheduler, is used to optimize the utilization of HELICS. Further necessary software tools are taken from the area of the worldwide OpenSource and Linux community and adapted to the special needs of the supercomputer in order to allow a complete control of system resources. Also some useful commercial software products are installed - eg. development tools like compilers.
Last Update: 19.10.2009
