CSC Introduces Finland's Most Powerful Computer System

the eFinland Weblog

Helsinki, 24 January, 2006 — The second phase of the Finnish IT center for science CSC's cluster system, by the network name sepeli.csc.fi, has been opened for customer use. The upgraded system is the most powerful computer in Finland. The sustained performance of the system according to the Linpack benchmark is 1990 Gflop/s and the peak performance about 3400 Gflop/s.

The cluster system consists of 256 HP Proliant DL 145 nodes. Each of the newly installed 128 nodes have two 2,2 GHz dual-core processors. The first phase, which was taken in use last September, contains 128 nodes with 256 single-core processors. All in all the number of cores are 768. Total size of the system memory is 1,6 Terabytes. Total size of the local disk storage capacity of the nodes is 40 Terabytes. Additionally there is 11 Terabytes of shared disk storage available on the disk servers.

The nodes are connected with each other and to the disk storage system using HP's ProCurve 2848 Gigabit Ethernet switches.

Jobs are submitted to the system using the front-end node. The batch processing system is Grid Engine. The machine is aimed for serial jobs, which consume plenty of processor time and for parallel jobs, whose inter-process communication load is moderate.

In the near future the parallel performance of the system will further increase when the InfiniBand switch, connecting 64 computing nodes has been installed. Thereafter it is possible to run parallel jobs with tightly coupled 256 cores.

Inauguration of the second phase of Sepeli eases the load of IBMSC and makes it possible to run larger jobs with bigger number of processors on it.

For more information:
CSC Helpdesk
phone: +358-9-457 2821

Development manager Totti Mäkelä
phone: +358-9-457 2055

More information
helpdesk@csc.fi
totti.makela@csc.fi

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