HP, in collaboration with Intel and the Supercomputing Centre of Galicia (CESGA) in Spain, has deployed Finis Terrae, one of the largest Intel Itanium-based shared memory supercomputers in the world.
Finis Terrae offers a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster that delivers the application performance, storage power and throughput needed to handle scientific, technological and research challenges at CESGA.
The supercomputer is especially suited for the high-performance computing used in nanotechnology, life science, ocean science, HPC architectures and environmental studies, and is intended help researchers perform scientific and technical research with a specific focus on applications that require very large memory sizes.
'At CESGA, we are contributing to the future of supercomputing in collaboration with HP, Intel and the research community of Galicia and CSIC [Spanish Council of Scientific Research],' explained Ignacio Lopez, technical director, CESGA. 'With the Galician universities, CSIC scientific community and other academic entities in Spain having access to Finis Terrae, the execution of high-performance calculation tasks to deliver quick analyses and valuable scientific results will contribute to the society's well-being.'
Finis Terrae completed 350,000 calculation hours, equivalent to 40 years in real time during a two-week benchmarking test. This process utilised only half of the supercomputer capacity, extracting 70 million pieces of data and conclusions that can now be used in research for crystallography and geotechnical engineering.
Designed to provide precise analysis and simulations, Finis Terrae offers:
- A cluster of 142 nodes with 16 Intel Itanium 2 processor cores each of HP Integrity rx7640 combined with HP Integrity Superdome servers with 1.3 terabytes (TB) of main memory. The rx7640 nodes are based on a 16-way shared memory architecture with scalable memory bandwidth and provide an accumulated shared memory space of 19 TB.
- An Infiniband high-performance interconnection network between all nodes including the Superdome systems.
- Advanced fibre optics that can reach a data transmission speed of 20 Gigabits per second at distances of up to 100m.
- Hierarchical storage system of 390TB on disc and 1 Petabyte on robotic tape libraries, the largest in Spain.
