The RSC Group, a Russian developer of HPC and data centre solutions, has announced the RSC PetaStream ultra-high density system.
RSC PetaStream sets a record for computing density of 1 PFlops peak performance per rack with just 1 m2, footprint. One RSC PetaStream rack contains 1,024 computing nodes and has the capability to remove over 400 kW of power efficiently using RSC’s direct liquid-cooling technology.
The new RSC PetaStream solution uses highly dense integration and a unique parallel system architecture delivered by the RSC engineers. Every system node is based on Intel Xeon Phi 5120D coprocessors featuring 60 cores and 8GB of high-bandwidth GDDR5 memory. All 1,024 nodes are interconnected using a high speed Infiniband FDR network.
The RSC PetaStream system is based on x86 architecture which is an industry standard, this aims to provide investment protection in software development and optimisation. The flexibility of RSC PetaStream architecture allows testing of new innovative programming models that may become more applicable in the Exascale era.
To ensure maximum density, high I/O throughput, reliability and manageability, multiple nodes inside RSC PetaStream system are grouped into a module that provides liquid cooling, efficient power delivery and conversion.
RSC PetaStream module consists of up to eight nodes based on Intel Xeon Phi products, I/O subsystem including Intel Server Board S1600JP with an Intel Xeon E5-2600 v2 processor, up to five solid-state drives (Intel SSD S3500 or S3700 series), along with tightly integrated network adapters, such as Mellanox Connect-IB adapter cards or Intel True Scale host adapters.
In addition to 1,024 Intel Xeon Phi based compute nodes, there are up to 640 solid state drives installed in every rack. These drives are managed by a scalable parallel file system, and aim to deliver a high number of IO operations per second to feed a number of cores in the system, as well as provide scalable capacity of local storage. When using 800 GB Intel SSD DC S3700 or DC S3500 series drives every rack has total local file storage capacity of 0.5 PB for the system with performance of 1 PFlops.
The new RSC solution supports a broad choice of interconnect types and enables expansion using various network cards, as well as the choice of network topologies and broad options for building data storage system within a supercomputer. The system module has two PCIe Gen3 x16 slots for standard and non-standard interface cards. This allows for, up to 4 Infiniband FDR or QDR ports, in addition to integrated for Gigabit-Ethernet adapter ports. Each module provides high throughput into an external network that exceeds 200 Gbps when a Mellanox Connect-IB dual-port adapter is used.
