Petapath and PRACEPetapath technology enables energy-efficient petaflop/s systems
Petapath has worked with HP and SGI on two separate supercomputing installations delivering prototype
Petaflop systems as part of the pan-European
Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) programme. Funded by the EU’s 7th Framework, PRACE brings together partners from 20 countries which together represent 91% of Europe’s high performance computing (HPC) capacity. The prototype at SARA supercomputing centre in Netherlands, was designed and built by Petapath. It shows an order of magnitude increase in computational performance and density with only modest increases in power dissipation. Accelerated systems of this type can open new possibilities for users of HPC, both in academia or industry. |
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System 1 - SARA (with HP)
At the Netherlands Computing Facility in Amsterdam, Petapath and HP delivered a power-efficient system, built on eight HP SL170 servers and next generation accelerator prototypes. The system achieves a peak performance of 10 teraflop/s double precision, which is equivalent to more then 60 conventional servers. The system consumes only 6kW of power. A full petascale system built with this technology would require only 10% of the power of todays leading petascale systems. |
System 2 - CINES (with SGI)
At the CINES supercomputing centre in Montpelier, France, Petapath incorporated the ClearSpeed accelerator technology into a conventional cluster designed by SGI and increased its performance by 50%, with only a 10% increase in power dissipation. |
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Each technology and architecture is currently being assessed with regard to peak performance/efficiency; programmability; energy efficiency; density; cooling and cost. Petapath is now working with PRACE partners to benchmark these systems and use them in a variety of applications including astronomy, computational medicine and numerical mathematics.