 | This article may be too technical for most readers to understand.(July 2013) |
Brutus is the central high-performance cluster of ETH Zurich. It was introduced to the public in May 2008. A new computing cluster called EULER has been announced and opened to the public in May 2014. [1]
Brutus is a heterogeneous system containing 11 different kinds of compute nodes:
In total Brutus contains 19,872 cores, plus a few hundreds in the cluster's file servers, login nodes and management nodes.
The peak performance of Brutus is slightly over 200 teraflops (200 × 1012 floating-point operations per second).
Thanks to its heterogeneous nature, Brutus can tackle a wide range of applications:
HyperTransport (HT), formerly known as Lightning Data Transport, is a technology for interconnection of computer processors. It is a bidirectional serial/parallel high-bandwidth, low-latency point-to-point link that was introduced on April 2, 2001. The HyperTransport Consortium is in charge of promoting and developing HyperTransport technology.
Opteron is AMD's x86 former server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture. It was released on April 22, 2003, with the SledgeHammer core (K8) and was intended to compete in the server and workstation markets, particularly in the same segment as the Intel Xeon processor. Processors based on the AMD K10 microarchitecture were announced on September 10, 2007, featuring a new quad-core configuration. The last released Opteron CPUs are the Piledriver-based Opteron 4300 and 6300 series processors, codenamed "Seoul" and "Abu Dhabi" respectively.
Alienware Corporation is an American computer hardware subsidiary brand of Dell. Their product range is dedicated to gaming computers and accessories and can be identified by their alien-themed designs. Alienware was founded in 1996 by Nelson Gonzalez and Alex Aguila. The development of the company is also associated with Frank Azor, Arthur Lewis, Joe Balerdi, and Michael S. Dell (CEO). The company's corporate headquarters is located in The Hammocks, Miami, Florida.
The AMD Quad FX platform is an AMD platform targeted at enthusiasts which allows users to plug two Socket F Athlon 64 FX or 2-way Opteron processors (CPUs) into a single motherboard for a total of four physical cores. This is a type of dual processor setup, where two CPUs are installed on a motherboard to increase computing power. The major difference between the platform and past dual processor systems like Xeon is that each processor has its own dedicated memory stores. The Quad FX platform also has HyperTransport capability targeted toward consumer platforms.
The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) Leadership Computing Facility that houses the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility charged with helping researchers solve challenging scientific problems of global interest with a combination of leading high-performance computing (HPC) resources and international expertise in scientific computing.
Jaguar or OLCF-2 was a petascale supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The massively parallel Jaguar had a peak performance of just over 1,750 teraFLOPS. It had 224,256 x86-based AMD Opteron processor cores, and operated with a version of Linux called the Cray Linux Environment. Jaguar was a Cray XT5 system, a development from the Cray XT4 supercomputer.
The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) is funded by the National Science Foundation and managed by the University of Tennessee. NICS was home to Kraken, the most powerful computer in the world managed by academia. The NICS petascale scientific computing environment is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), home to the world's most powerful computing complex. The mission of NICS, a member of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE - formerly TeraGrid), is to enable the scientific discoveries of researchers nationwide by providing leading-edge computational resources, together with support for their effective use, and leveraging extensive partnership opportunities.
POWER8 is a family of superscalar multi-core microprocessors based on the Power ISA, announced in August 2013 at the Hot Chips conference. The designs are available for licensing under the OpenPOWER Foundation, which is the first time for such availability of IBM's highest-end processors.
The Cray XK6 made by Cray is an enhanced version of the Cray XE6 supercomputer, announced in May 2011. The XK6 uses the same "blade" architecture of the XE6, with each XK6 blade comprising four compute "nodes". Each node consists of a 16-core AMD Opteron 6200 processor with 16 or 32 GB of DDR3 RAM and an Nvidia Tesla X2090 GPGPU with 6 GB of GDDR5 RAM, the two connected via PCI Express 2.0. Two Gemini router ASICs are shared between the nodes on a blade, providing a 3-dimensional torus network topology between nodes. This means that it has 576 GB of Graphics memory and over 1500 CPU cores, several orders of magnitude more powerful than the best publicly available computer on the market.
XK7 is a supercomputing platform, produced by Cray, launched on October 29, 2012. XK7 is the second platform from Cray to use a combination of central processing units ("CPUs") and graphical processing units ("GPUs") for computing; the hybrid architecture requires a different approach to programming to that of CPU-only supercomputers. Laboratories that host XK7 machines host workshops to train researchers in the new programming languages needed for XK7 machines. The platform is used in Titan, the world's second fastest supercomputer in the November 2013 list as ranked by the TOP500 organization. Other customers include the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre which has a 272 node machine and Blue Waters has a machine that has Cray XE6 and XK7 nodes that performs at approximately 1 petaFLOPS (1015 floating-point operations per second).
The AMD Jaguar Family 16h is a low-power microarchitecture designed by AMD. It is used in APUs succeeding the Bobcat Family microarchitecture in 2013 and being succeeded by AMD's Puma architecture in 2014. It is two-way superscalar and capable of out-of-order execution. It is used in AMD's Semi-Custom Business Unit as a design for custom processors and is used by AMD in four product families: Kabini aimed at notebooks and mini PCs, Temash aimed at tablets, Kyoto aimed at micro-servers, and the G-Series aimed at embedded applications. Both the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One use SoCs based on the Jaguar microarchitecture, with more powerful GPUs than AMD sells in its own commercially available Jaguar APUs.
AMD Steamroller Family 15h is a microarchitecture developed by AMD for AMD APUs, which succeeded Piledriver in the beginning of 2014 as the third-generation Bulldozer-based microarchitecture. Steamroller APUs continue to use two-core modules as their predecessors, while aiming at achieving greater levels of parallelism.
AMD Excavator Family 15h is a microarchitecture developed by AMD to succeed Steamroller Family 15h for use in AMD APU processors and normal CPUs. On October 12, 2011, AMD revealed Excavator to be the code name for the fourth-generation Bulldozer-derived core.
The ARM Cortex-A57 is a central processing unit implementing the ARMv8-A 64-bit instruction set designed by ARM Holdings. The Cortex-A57 is an out-of-order superscalar pipeline. It is available as SIP core to licensees, and its design makes it suitable for integration with other SIP cores into one die constituting a system on a chip (SoC).
High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a computer memory interface for 3D-stacked synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) initially from Samsung, AMD and SK Hynix. It is used in conjunction with high-performance graphics accelerators, network devices, high-performance datacenter AI ASICs, as on-package cache in CPUs and on-package RAM in upcoming CPUs, and FPGAs and in some supercomputers. The first HBM memory chip was produced by SK Hynix in 2013, and the first devices to use HBM were the AMD Fiji GPUs in 2015.
The Holland Computing Center, often abbreviated HCC, is the high-performance computing core for the University of Nebraska System. HCC has locations in both the University of Nebraska-Lincoln June and Paul Schorr III Center for Computer Science & Engineering and the University of Nebraska Omaha Peter Kiewit Institute. The center was named after Omaha businessman Richard Holland who donated considerably to the university for the project.
PICO is an Intel Cluster installed in the data center of Cineca. PICO is intended to enable new "BigData" classes of applications, related to the management and processing of large quantities of data, coming both from simulations and experiments. The cluster is made of an Intel NeXtScale server, designed to optimize density and performance, driving a large data repository shared among all the HPC systems in Cineca.
The Nvidia DGX represents a series of servers and workstations designed by Nvidia, primarily geared towards enhancing deep learning applications through the use of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU). These systems typically come in a rackmount format featuring high-performance x86 server CPUs on the motherboard.
The Alps supercomputer is a high-performance computer funded by the Swiss Confederation through the ETH Domain, with its main location in Lugano. It is part of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), which provides computing services for selected scientific customers.