MEGWARE once again supplies Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, with its new high-performance computer MOGON (II)

Chemnitz. September 2, 2016 – MEGWARE

As the central scientific institution at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (JGU), the Information Technology Center (ZDV) is the point of contact for all members of the university – students and staff – for information and communications technology services.

Back in 2012, MEGWARE was awarded one of the then biggest contracts for the supply of a high-performance computer in its history. Within the space of just eight weeks, MEGWARE had supplied a system based on an initial 535 nodes, with over 34,000 AMD Opteron cores, and, with a performance of 235 TFlop/s, placed the system at number 81 in the ranking of the 500 fastest computers in the world.
 

“We first built up a high level of trust and proved our efficiency. This time, with the tender for the MOGON II, it was therefore a particular challenge to live up to these standards, and we focused all our attention on achieving the best value for money and selecting the right technical components,” says Jörg Heydemueller, HPC representative at MEGWARE.
 

Following a recommendation of the German Council of Science and Humanities, the new MOGON II high-performance computer is backed by the German Federal Government and the State of Rhineland-Palatinate, and comprises a total of 820 nodes and servers with the latest Intel Xeon ‘Broadwell-EP’ E5 processor technology, based on the 2630v4 with 10 cores and 2.2 GHz. 16,400 CPU cores are integrated in the entire system, and two thirds of the computing nodes are equipped with 64 GiB of main memory – additional nodes will comprise 128 GiB, 256 GiB, 512 GiB, and 1 TiB. State-of-the-art 200 and 400 GB SSD Enterprise hard disks serve as local storage. All nodes are interconnected using the latest cutting-edge high-speed cluster interconnect Intel Omni-Path. Similar to the previous MOGON system, for which QDR InfiniBand served as the interconnect, a complex Omni-Path fabric can be modularly implemented via flexible cabling and appropriate switch levels, to link together all system components. Omni-Path is closely related to InfiniBand, but, as part of Intel’s Scalable System Framework, offers several additional advantages for significantly greater HPC system scalability.
 

Professor André Brinkmann, Head of the ZDV, talks positively of the excellent collaboration to date: “The new high-performance computer MOGON II will considerably enhance the performance of our HPC infrastructure even further, and thereby open up new opportunities, in particular for natural scientists at JGU. Because our experience of cooperating with MEGWARE setting up and operating MOGON has so far been so positive, we’re delighted to once again be partnering up with the company for the operation of our new high-performance computer.”
 

CentOS 7.2. is installed as the Linux operating system, which guarantees support for the integration of GPFS, Lustre, and BeeGFS client software for all nodes, as well as for RDMA communication for all file systems.
 

With a contract volume of €2.8 million, the entire system will be produced and tested by engineers and technicians at MEGWARE’s headquarters in Chemnitz, and then integrated into 12 racks in Mainz.

Image source: Thomas Hartmann