MEGWARE awarded contract from Friedrich Schiller University Jena for the delivery of a new supercomputer.
Chemnitz. September 2, 2016 – MEGWARE
The University of Jena has commissioned MEGWARE to deliver a new high-performance computing cluster (HPCC) for scientific research in the Advanced Computing, Gravitational Theory, Theoretical Chemistry, Bioinformatics, Visual Recognition, Computational Material Science and Scientific Computing work groups. The acquisition has been arranged in cooperation with the University Computing Centre (URZ). As an equal partner, the URZ represents other university organizations involved with the acquisition of the computing cluster.
The new high-performance computing cluster will be installed at the URZ in October 2016 with funds totaling EUR 1 million. More than 125 computing nodes, each with 2x Intel Xeon Broadwell E5-2650v4 12-core processors and 2.2 GHz of processing power per CPU, will be installed in the Twin² 2U enclosure. The computing nodes are equipped with a generous 128 GiB of internal memory and a local 256 GiB SSD hard drive. An additional 10 nodes will be integrated in parallel for the use of GPUs in the overall system. Two 1-HE twin enclosures will be installed as FAT nodes that are identical to the computing nodes with a generous 1024 GiB of internal memory in the overall system for especially computing-intensive applications. All nodes, including service and login nodes as well as the storage system, are interconnected using the latest cutting-edge Interconnect Intel Omni-Path high-speed cluster. Much like Infiniband, Omni-Path can be routed via cable and the appropriate switches to couple all components in the overall system. Omni-Path is closely related to Infiniband, but offers several useful advantages. In particular, the new Scalable System Framework (SSF) architecture promises a better, more scalable and more flexible HPC system.
Professor Martin Bücker from the Institute of Informatics at the University of Jena is delighted about the forthcoming installation of the high-performance computing cluster: “The latest findings in science, industry and society are increasingly the product of data-driven analysis and computationally intensive simulations. Our long awaited computer will thus greatly improve the range of possibilities when working in a host of different scientific disciplines.”
The storage system has two metadata servers and three object storage servers and is based on the parallel BeeGFS file system configuration, delivering 4.8 TB of usable capacity for metadata. In the configuration that will be delivered, this storage capacity is halved, to 2.4 TB, thanks to an additional mirroring function used for distributed storage and the backup of the metadata. This is a standard feature of BeeGFS and enables parallel storage on two different servers. Based on the object storage server configuration, a net capacity of 96 TB is available, yielding a usable total capacity of 288 TB for all three servers.
“The University of Jena and MEGWARE have had a close partnership since 2008. At the time, we played a major part in setting up the OMEGA Linux cluster and have been continuously expanding it up to the present day. The last stage of expansion in 2013 included 31 nodes. So now we’re all the more pleased to once again be taking a really big step forward with the expansion of the HPC infrastructure,” said André Singer, HPC Project Manager at MEGWARE.