Faster Computing

The High Performance Computing Center (HLRS; http://www.hlrs.de/home) at the University of Stuttgart is the first federal high-performance computing center in Germany. Clearly, this is no run-of-the-mill place. It was there that Cray (www.cray.com) launched its Cray XT5m midrange supercomputer in March 2009, with HLRS being the first customer for the system. HLRS will use the system for basic and applied research, with both scientific and industrial partners.

The XT5m is a massively parallel processing (MPP) system that uses a two-dimensional torus architecture (the Cray SeaStar-based network) and is optimized for application performance between 500 and 5,000 processing cores. It is designed to be able to accommodate new technologies, such at next-generation compute processors, including the upcoming Istanbul processors from AMD (www.amd.com). The XT5m, which is offered with up to six cabinets, features 64-bit Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors (up to 192 per cabinet). It uses a Linux-based operating system.

According to Earl Joseph, vice president at analyst firm IDC (www.idc.com), “The new Cray XT5m product scales down Cray’s successful high-end Cray XT architecture to cover the entire supercomputer market segment that starts at $500,000.”

Proving the capability of the new system, Raymond Ni, Crash & Safety Technical Director at digital simulation software provider ESI Group (www.esi-group.com), said, “We recently had the opportunity of porting ESI’s PAM-CRASH”—a physics-based simulation software package for performing automotive crash simulations—“to Cray’s XT5”—the high-end supercomputer—“and XT5m platforms. Thanks to our new parallel paradigm design, we can confirm excellent scalability up to 1,024 CPU cores investigating a two-million elements size car-to-car crash scenario. The computation time was brought down to 25 minutes, including domain decomposition and result file merging.” PAM-CRASH, incidentally, is one of the key applications for the XT5m at HLRS