Moscow — German team TUMuch Phun from Technical University of Munich (TUM) won the Highest Linpack Award in the Student Cluster Competition (SCC) held November 16-18, 2015, during the worldwide supercomputing conference and exhibition SC15 in Austin, TX. Performance of 7.1 Tflops has been achieved on RSC PetaStream cluster with computing nodes based on Intel Xeon Phi. The team’s equipment was provided as a technological sponsorship by RSC Group, a Russian developer and vendor of innovative solutions for HPC and data centers. In addition, TUM student team took 3rd place in the overall competition, within nine teams participating in SCC at SC15, and only one European representative in this challenge.
The Student Cluster Competition, which debuted at SC07 in Reno and has since been replicated in Europe, Asia and Africa, is a real-time, non-stop, 48-hour challenge in which teams of six undergraduates race to complete a real-world workload across a series of scientific applications, demonstrate knowledge of system architecture and application performance, and impress HPC industry judges. The students partner with vendors to design and build a cutting-edge cluster from commercially available components, not to exceed a 3120-watt power limit and work with application experts to tune and run the competition codes.
“We thank RSC Group for their excellent technology support for our team TUMuch Phun during the preparation for SCC. The energy efficiency of their RSC PetaStream cluster with Intel Xeon Phi not only showed the highest Linpack performance in the competition, but also strongly contributed to our remarkable 3rd place overall,” said Michael Bader, Professor of TUM.
It’s important to mention that TUM was the only team that used the energy-efficient solution with Intel Xeon Phi, while all other student teams used CPU-only or GPU-based systems. The scope of applications the German team used to run on RSC PetaStream system is:
- Linpack benchmark
- Trinity (a novel method for the efficient and robust de novo reconstruction of transcriptomes from RNA-seq data)
- WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting)
- MILC (the code is a varied suite of applications designed to study Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) the theory of Nature’s strong force)
- HPC Repast (agent-based modeling system written in C++ that is useful in social science modeling to understand characteristics of a global population that are difficult to predict based only on the rules that govern the behavior of the agents)
- HPCG benchmark (High Performance Conjugate Gradient)
“TUM team’s win of the Highest Linpack Award is one more practical confirmation for very high performance and reliability of RSC PetaStream massively parallel architecture, which also provides the best energy-efficiency. We are very proud that our server equipment, software tools for cluster management and technological support provided from RSC helped to achieve such high results in the Student Cluster Competition,” commented Alexander Moskovsky, CEO of RSC Technologies (RSC Group).
The German student team was equipped with a computing system containing one RSC PetaStream computing module (8x computing nodes, massively parallel architecture) and one RSC Breeze computing node (cluster architecture) having joint high speed Mellanox EDR InfiniBand interconnect and data storage subsystem.
RSC PetaStream computing module:
- 8x nodes based on Intel Xeon Phi 7120 (61 cores, 16 GB GDDR5 memory)
- peak performance of 9.66 Tflops
- 488 cores (х86 architecture)
- total GDDR5 memory volume – 128 GB
- Mellanox InfiniBand ConnectX-4 Dual-port HCA adapters
RSC Breeze computing node:
- 2x Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3 processor (18 cores, 2.30 GHz each)
- peak performance of 1.33 Tflops
- 128 GB of DDR4 memory
- Intel Server Board S2600WT
- Mellanox InfiniBand ConnectX-4 Dual-port HCA adapter
Joint SSD based data storage subsystem, 7.2 ТB
- 3.2 TB – 2x Intel SSD DC S3610 (SATA, 1.6 TB each)
- 4 TB – Intel SSD DC P3608 (NVMe)
Software tools for cluster management
- RSC BasIS integrated system software stack optimized for HPC environment and usage.
High speed communication network based on
- Mellanox EDR InfiniBand SB7790 switch (36 ports)
The total power consumption for all computing equipment was not exceeded 3kW.
In addition to the TUM team from Germany, the SC15 Student Cluster Competition line-up included other student teams from around the world:
- Arizona Tri-University Team (United States)
- Illinois Institute of Technology (United States)
- National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan)
- Northeastern University (United States)
- Pawsey Supercomputing Centre (Australia)
- Tsinghua University (China)
- Universidad EAFIT (Columbia)
- University of Oklahoma (United States)
About RSC Group
RSC Group is a Russian and CIS developer and integrator of innovative HPC and data center solutions based on Intel architecture and technology, advanced liquid cooling and its own extensive know-how. The company’s potential allows for practical creation of the most energy efficient solutions with record PUE, realization of industry-highest computing density based on x86 standard processors, completely green design, the highest reliability of solutions, complete noiselessness of computing modules, 100 percent compatibility and guaranteed scalability, while ensuring lowest total cost of ownership and small energy consumption. Additionally, RSC specialists are experienced in development and implementation of a complete software solution stack for increased effectiveness and usability of supercomputer systems ranging from system software to vertically oriented platforms on the basis of cloud computing technology.
RSC participates in the Intel Technology Provider Program at the Platinum level and Intel Fabric Builders Program. Performance and scalability of RSC PetaStream and RSC Tornado-based solutions are Intel Cluster Ready certified.