The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden has agreed to a partnership with AMD and HPE to supply a new HPC system that will replace the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing’s (SNIC) current flagship system.
The supercomputer ‘Dardel’ is named in honour of the Swedish author Thora Dardel and her husband, the painter Nils Dardel. It will be housed at Stockholm’s Center for High Performance Computing (PDC) and will replace the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing’s current flagship system at PDC. PDC is working closely with the developers of leading HPC research applications in grand challenge areas – like computational fluid dynamics, biophysics and quantum chemistry – to ensure that their applications are adapted to take full advantage of the increased computing power of the new system.
Professor Hans Karlsson, director of Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) said: ‘In recent times, we have seen a dramatic increase in the extent to which researchers need to use accelerators (mainly in the form of GPUs). We will soon be able to meet that demand through the accelerator partition in Dardel. Dardel will significantly increase the Swedish capacity for research that requires access to large-scale computational resources.’
Powered by the HPE Cray EX supercomputer featuring AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct GPU accelerators, the compute performance of 13.5 PFlop/s will provide a magnificent boost to computational science and engineering research in Sweden.
The Dardel system will be installed in two phases. HPE will deliver the first phase of the system, consisting of the CPU partition and a storage system, before summer this year. This initial phase of the computer will provide SNIC users with about 65,000 CPU cores for performing their research calculations. The second phase of Dardel, comprised of a GPU partition, will be delivered later this year in the autumn. Researchers will start using the first phase of Dardel from July this year and the second phase from January next year.
Peter Ungaro, senior vice president and general manager, HPC and mission-critical solutions at HPE said: ‘High performance computing (HPC) technologies are broadly used in R&D to advance the technologies that go into the products and services we use each day. For decades, the PDC Center for High Performance Computing at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology has empowered a community of researchers to make breakthroughs across a range of industries using HPC. We are honoured to have been selected by the KTH Royal Institute of Technology to deliver the latest HPE Cray EX supercomputer with next-generation AMD technologies and provide an even greater level of performance to improve and expand their research and drive innovation for Swedish industrial companies.’
Roger Benson, Senior Director, Commercial EMEA at AMD said: ‘We are thrilled to be working with HPE and KTH on this advanced supercomputer project. The combination of cutting-edge AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators will enable scientists and research institutions to meet and exceed the growing computational demand of today's HPC workloads while advancing their research.’
