Heavy ion research at GSI (Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung) is benefitting from AMD’s most powerful GPU server card and the latest OpenCL implementations.
GSI, a research facility for heavy ion research, located in Darmstadt, Germany has achieved in excess of 3 petaflops of single precision performance using 4 AMD FirePro S9150 server GPU’s per server.
Each of the 160 ASUS ESC4000 G2S nodes of the new L-CSC cluster include four AMD FirePro S9150 server GPUs, for a total GPU peak of 3.25 petaFLOPS single precision and 1.62 petaFLOPS double precision performance.
High energy physics experiments, such as at GSI, need huge compute farms for simulations. The L-CSC cluster is aimed at QCD computations, which require extremely high memory bandwidth. The implementation of the Lattice QCD algorithm was developed at FIAS using an OpenCL based implementation for portability and flexibility.
David Cummings, senior director and general manager, professional graphics, AMD said: ‘AMD is proud to collaborate with ASUS, the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, (FIAS) and GSI to support such important physics and computer science research. This installation reaffirms AMD’s leading role in HPC with the implementation of the AMD FirePro S9150 server GPUs in this three petaFLOPS supercomputer cluster. AMD and ASUS are enabling OpenCL™ applications for critical science research usage for this cluster. We’re committed to building our HPC leadership position in the industry as a foremost provider of computing applications, tools and technologies.’
‘We had excellent cooperation with ASUS and AMD to make this project happen in such a short timeframe,’ said Professor Doctor Volker Lindenstruth, professor at Goethe University of Frankfurt and chairman of Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies.
Lindenstruth continued: ‘The ASUS ESC4000 G2S servers and the AMD FirePro S9150 GPUs are an extremely powerful basis for the L-CSC cluster and they provide the compute capabilities we need for our research. The large 16GB of memory of the AMD FirePro S9150 server GPUs allows us to run most LQCD computations on one GPU without inter-GPU and inter-node communication resulting in very efficient LQCD application operation. We have chosen a multi-GPU approach with four GPU boards per server to enable an extremely cost-efficient and energy-efficient configuration.’
Tom Lin, ASUS General Manager said: ‘ASUS is passionate about the HPC field, in the same way that AMD is dedicated to delivering extreme-performance GPU solutions. Together, ASUS and AMD have reached a new level with the GSI project, revealing the true power of ASUS ESC4000 G2S GPU servers and AMD FirePro S9150 GPUs. We’re proud to offer our customers solutions that deliver unparalleled performance and utmost energy efficiency. There is no doubt that our joint GSI project delivers top-tier performance for critical HPC applications.’
AMD is exhibiting with AMD FirePro S9150 server GPUs and AMD server technologies at SC ’14 in New Orleans Ernest Memorial Convention Center booth #839 from November 17 to 20.
