Supercomputing in Europe

An SGI Altix supercomputer at the CINES facility in France.

Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.[1]

In June 2011, France's Tera 100 was certified the fastest supercomputer in Europe, and ranked 9th in the world at the time.[2][3][4][5] It was the first petascale supercomputer designed and built in Europe.[6]

Switzerland's Piz Daint is the fastest European supercomputer, following an upgrade in October 2016 it is ranked 3rd in the world with a peak of over 25 petaflops.[7]

There are several efforts to coordinate European leadership in high-performance computing. The ETP4HPC Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) outlines a technology roadmap for exascale in Europe, with a key motivation being an increase in the global market share of the HPC technology developed in Europe.[8] The Eurolab4HPC Vision provides a long-term roadmap, covering the years 2023 to 2030, with the aim of fostering academic excellence in European HPC research.[9]

Belgium

On 25 October 2012, Ghent University (Belgium) inaugurated the first Tier 1 supercomputer of the Flemish Supercomputer Centre (VSC). The supercomputer is part of an initiative by the Flemish government to provide the researchers in Flanders with a very powerful computing infrastructure. The new cluster was ranked 163rd in the worldwide Top500 list of supercomputers in November 2012.[10][11] In 2014, a supercomputer started operating at Cenaero in Gosselies. In 2016, VSC started operating the BrENIAC supercomputer (NEC HPC1816Rg, Xeon E5-2680v4 14C 2.4GHz, Infiniband EDR) in Leuven. It has 16,128 cores providing 548,000 Gflops (Rmax) or 619,315 Gflops (Repack).[12]

Bulgaria

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Sofia operates an IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer, which offers high-performance processing to the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Sofia University, among other organizations.[13] This system is one of the few supercomputers in Eastern Europe, and the only one in the Balkans. The system was on the TOP500 list until November 2009, when it ranked as number 379.[14]

Croatia

The Center for Advanced Computing and Modelling (CNRM) in Rijeka was established in 2010 and conducts multidisciplinary scientific research through the use of advanced high-performance solutions based on CPU and GPGPU server technologies and technologies for data storage.[15] They operate the supercomputer "Bura" which consists of 288 computing nodes and has a total of 6912 CPU cores, its peak performance is 233.6 teraflops and it ranked at 440th on the November 2015 TOP500 list.[16]

Finland

CSC – IT Center for Science operated a Cray XC30 system called "Sisu" with 244 TFlop/s.[17] In September 2014 the system was upgraded to Cray XC40, giving a theoretical peak of 1,688 TFLOPS. Sisu was ranked 37th in the November 2014 Top500 list,[18] but had dropped to 107th by November 2017.[19]

France

The Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA) operates the Tera 100 machine in the Research and Technology Computing Center in Essonne, Île-de-France.[2] The Tera 100 has a peak processing speed of 1,050 teraflops, making it the fastest supercomputer in Europe in 2011.[3] Built by Groupe Bull, it had 140,000 processors.[20]

The National Computer Center of Higher Education (French acronym: CINES) was established in Montpellier in 1999, and offers computer services for research and higher education.[21][22] In 2014 the Occigen system was installed, which was manufacturered by the Bull, Atos Group. It has 50,544 cores and a peak performance of 2.1 Petaflops [23][24].

Germany

In Germany, supercomputing is organized at two levels. The three national centers at Garching (LRZ), Juelich (JSC) and Stuttgart (HLRS) together form the Gauss Center for Supercomputing, and provide both the European Tier 0 level of HPC and the German national Tier 1 level. A number of medium-sized centers are also organized in the Gauss Alliance.

The Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing jointly owned the JUGENE computer at the Forschungszentrum Jülich in North Rhine-Westphalia. JUGENE was based on IBM's Blue Gene/P architecture, and in June 2011 was ranked the 12th fastest computer in the world by TOP500.[25] It was replaced by the Blue Gene/Q system JUQUEEN on 31 July 2012.[26]

The Leibniz-Rechenzentrum, a supercomputing center in Munich, houses the SuperMUC system, which began operations in 2012 at a processing speed of 3 petaflops. This was, at the time it entered service, the fastest supercomputer in Europe. The High Performance Computing Center in Stuttgart fastest computing system is Hazel Hen with a peak performance of more than 7.4 petaflops. Hazel Hen is based on Cray XC40 technology and was ranked the 8th fastest system of the world in the November 2015 TOP500 List.[27]

Ireland

The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) is the national supercomputing centre and operates the Fionn[28] supercomputer, a heterogeneous system whose core partition consists of a 7,680-processor SGI ICE X cluster providing 147 TFLOPS of computing power and 20 TB of memory. Fionn also contains nodes with many-core technology from Intel (Xeon Phi coprocessors) and Nvidia (Tesla GPGPU cards), as well as a SGI UV partition with 112 processors and 1.7 TB of shared memory.

Italy

The main supercomputing institution in Italy is CINECA, a consortium of many universities and research institutions scattered throughout the country. As of 2017, the highest CINECA supercomputer in the TOP500 list (14th place) is Marconi, an Intel Xeon computer made by Lenovo with 241,808 cores for 6,223.0 TFLOPS and 1,600 kW.[29]

Due to the involvement of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in the main experiments taking place at CERN, Italy also hosts some of the largest nodes of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, including one Tier 1 facility and 11 Tier 2 facilities out of 151 total nodes.[30][31]

Netherlands

The European Grid Infrastructure, a continent-wide distributed computing system, is headquartered at the Science Park in Amsterdam.[32]

Norway

The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim operates the "Vilje" supercomputer, owned by NTNU and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. "Vilje" is operating at 275 teraflops.[33]

The University of Oslo operates the "Abel" supercomputer, named after the famous Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel (1802–1829), owned by UiO. "Abel" currently operates at 258 teraflops,[34] and was ranked 96th in the TOP500 list in June 2012 when it was installed.[35]

Poland

Currently, since 2015, the fastest supercomputer in Poland is "Prometheus" that belongs to the AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków.[36] It provides 2399 teraflops of computing power and has 10 petabytes of storage.[37] It currently holds 21st place in Europe, and was 77th in the world according to the November 2017 TOP500 list.[38].

The Polish Grid Infrastructure PL-Grid was built between 2009 and 2011 as a nationwide computing infrastructure, and will remain within the PLGrid Plus project until 2014. At the end of 2012, it provided 230 teraflops of computing power and 3,600 terabytes of storage for the Polish scientific community.

The Galera computer cluster at the Gdansk University of Technology was ranked 299th on the TOP500 list in November 2010.[39][40] The Zeus computer cluster at the ACK Cyfronet AGH in Kraków was ranked 106th on the TOP500 list in November 2012, but had dropped to 386th by November 2015.[41]

Russia

In November 2011, the 33,072-processor Lomonosov supercomputer in Moscow was ranked the 18th-fastest supercomputer in the world, and the third-fastest in Europe. The system was designed by T-Platforms, and used Xeon 2.93 GHz processors, Nvidia 2070 GPUs, and an Infiniband interconnect.[42] In July 2011, the Russian government announced a plan to focus on constructing larger supercomputers by 2020.[43] In September 2011, T-Platforms stated that it would deliver a water-cooled supercomputer in 2013.[44]

Since 2016, Russia has had the most powerful military supercomputer in the world with a speed of 16 petaflops, called the NDMC Supercomputer.

Slovenia

The Slovenian National Grid Initiative (NGI) provides resources to the European Grid Initiative (EGI). It is represented in the EGI Council by ARNES. ARNES manages a cluster for testing computing technology where users can also submit jobs. The cluster consists of 2300 cores and is growing.[45]

Arctur also provides computer resources on its Arctur-2 and previously Arctur-1 supercomputers to the Slovenian NGI and industry as the only privately owned HPC provider in the region.[46]

The Jožef Stefan Institute has most of the HPC installations in Slovenia. They are not however a single uniform HPC system, but several dispersed systems at separate research departments (F-1,[47] F-9[48] and R-4[49]).

Spain

The Magerit computer at the Supercomputing and Visualization Center of Madrid.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is located at the Technical University of Catalonia and was established in 2005.[50] The center operates the Tier-0 11.1 petaflops MareNostrum supercomputer and other supercomputing facilities. This centre manages the Red Española de Supercomputación (RES). The BSC is a hosting member of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) HPC initiative. The Supercomputing and Visualization Center of Madrid (CeSViMa) at the Technical University of Madrid operates the 72-teraflop Magerit supercomputer, which uses 86 IBM BladeCenters. The Spanish Supercomputing Network furthermore provides access to several supercomputers distributed across Spain.

Sweden

The National Supercomputer Centre in Sweden (NSC) is located in Linköping and operates the Triolith supercomputer which achieved 407.2 Teraflop/s on the Linpack benchmark which placed it 79th on the November 2013 TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world.[51] In mid-2018 "Triolith" will be superseded by "Tetralith", which will have an estimated maximum speed of just over 4 petaflops.[52]

Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology operates the Beskow supercomputer, which consists of 53,632 processors and has achieved sustained 1.397 Petaflops/s.[53]

Switzerland

The office building of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, with part of the computing building on the left edge of the photo.

The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre was founded in 1991 and is operated by ETH Zurich. It is based in Lugano, Ticino, and provides supercomputing services to national research institutions and Swiss universities, as well as the international CERN organisation and MeteoSchweiz, the Swiss weather service.[54] In February 2011, the center placed an order for a Cray XMT massively parallel supercomputer.[55]

The IBM Aquasar supercomputer became operational at ETH Zurich in 2010. It uses hot water cooling to achieve heat efficiency, with the computation-heated water used to heat the buildings of the university campus.[56][57]

United Kingdom

The EPCC supercomputer center was established at the University of Edinburgh in 1990.[58] The HECToR project at the University of Edinburgh provided supercomputing services using a 360-teraflop Cray XE6 system, the fastest supercomputer in the UK.[59] In 2013, HECToR was replaced by ARCHER, a Cray XC30 system.[60] The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in Reading, Berkshire, operates a 100-teraflop IBM pSeries-based system.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Talia, Domenico (2008). Grid Middleware and Services: Challenges and Solutions. New York: Springer. pp. 109–110. ISBN 0-387-78445-4.
  2. 1 2 "High performance computing at CEA". CEA. Retrieved 10 October 2012.
  3. 1 2 Brueckner, Rich (21 June 2011). "Tera 100 is Europe's Most Powerful Supercomputer". Inside HPC. Retrieved 10 January 2013.
  4. ↑ "TOP500 Supercomputers". TOP500. June 2011. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  5. ↑ "World's fastest supercomputers: Tera-100 (France)". CNN Money. 20 June 2011. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  6. ↑ "Bull: Tera 100, Europe's most powerful supercomputer, is powered up for the first time". Bloomberg News. 27 May 2010. Archived from the original on 5 November 2012. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  7. ↑ "Piz Daint - Cray XC50, Xeon E5-2690v3 12C 2.6GHz, Aries interconnect, NVIDIA Tesla P100". TOP500. Retrieved 29 November 2017.
  8. ↑ etp4hpc. "Home | etp4hpc". www.etp4hpc.eu. Retrieved 2018-07-06.
  9. ↑ "Eurolab4HPC Vision - Eurolab4HPC". Eurolab4HPC. Retrieved 2018-07-06.
  10. ↑ "Tier1 supercomputer". Ghent University. 28 November 2012. Archived from the original on 15 January 2013. Retrieved 16 May 2018.
  11. ↑ "TOP500 Supercomputers (101 to 200)". TOP500. November 2012. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  12. ↑ "BrENIAC - NEC HPC1816Rg, Xeon E5-2680v4 14C 2.4GHz, Infiniband EDR". TOP500. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  13. ↑ "Bulgaria PM Opens National Supercomputer Research Center". Novinite. 9 September 2008. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  14. ↑ "Bulgarian State Agency for Information Technology and Communications (SAITC)". TOP500. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  15. ↑ "CNRM - Center for Advanced Computing and Modelling". University of Rijeka. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  16. ↑ "BURA - bullx DLC 720, Xeon E5-2690v3 12C 2.6GHz, Infiniband FDR". TOP500. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  17. ↑ "Sisu now in production". CSC – IT Center for Science. 18 March 2013. Archived from the original on 9 April 2013. Retrieved 15 March 2014.
  18. ↑ "Sisu supercomputer". CSC – IT Center for Science. Retrieved 16 May 2018.
  19. ↑ "TOP500 Supercomputers (101 to 200)". TOP500. November 2017. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  20. ↑ Sayer, Peter (28 May 2010). "Bull Bills Tera 100 as Europe's First Petaflop Computer". PC World. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  21. ↑ "Overview". CINES. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  22. ↑ Zelkowitz, Marvin V. (2009). Advances in Computers: Computer Performance Issues. Boston: Academic Press. p. 79. ISBN 0-12-374810-0.
  23. ↑ "OCCIGEN: the new supercomputer". CINES. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  24. ↑ "Occigen - bullx DLC, Xeon E5-2690v3 12C 2.6GHz, Infiniband FDR". TOP500. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  25. ↑ "Europe's fastest supercomputer unveiled in Germany". Phys.org. 26 May 2009. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  26. ↑ "Farewell JUGENE". Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC). 13 July 2012. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  27. ↑ "Top500 Supercomputers". TOP500. November 2015. Retrieved 17 July 2016.
  28. ↑ "Fionn". ICHEC. Retrieved 19 September 2014.
  29. ↑ "TOP500 Supercomputers (1 to 100)". TOP500. November 2017. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  30. ↑ "The Tier Sites". Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. Archived from the original on 1 March 2010. Retrieved 17 March 2012.
  31. ↑ "Topology of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid". WLCG. Archived from the original on 2 July 2012. Retrieved 17 March 2012.
  32. ↑ "European Grid Initiative Head Office comes to Science Park Amsterdam". University of Amsterdam. 23 March 2009. Retrieved 17 October 2011.
  33. ↑ "NTNU får Norges kraftigste superdatamaskin". Norwegian University of Science and Technology (in Norwegian). 24 June 2011. Archived from the original on 22 July 2012. Retrieved 16 January 2013.
  34. ↑ "About Abel". University of Oslo. 4 April 2018. Retrieved 16 May 2018.
  35. ↑ "TOP500 Supercomputers (1 to 100)". TOP500. June 2012. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  36. ↑ "Prometheus in TOP100 of the fastest supercomputers in the world". AGH University of Science and Technology. 22 November 2016. Retrieved 26 August 2017.
  37. ↑ "Prometheus". Akadamickie Centrum Komputerowe CYFRONET AGH. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  38. ↑ "Prometheus - HP Apollo 8000, Xeon E5-2680v3 12C 2.5GHz, Infiniband FDR, NVIDIA Tesla K40". TOP500. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  39. ↑ "Galera - ACTION Cluster Xeon E5345 Infiniband". TOP500. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  40. ↑ "Poland's supercomputer among Europe's top 10". Electronic Engineering Times. 21 April 2008. Archived from the original on 27 September 2013.
  41. ↑ "Zeus - Cluster Platform SL390/BL2x220, Xeon X5650 6C 2.660GHz, Infiniband QDR, NVIDIA 2090". TOP500. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  42. ↑ "TOP500 Supercomputers (1 to 100)". TOP500. November 2011. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  43. ↑ Thibodeau, Patrick (25 July 2011). "Russia steps up game in supercomputing". ComputerWorld. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  44. ↑ "Russia Plans to Build Exascale Supercomputer in 2020". HPCWire. 29 September 2011. Archived from the original on 31 January 2012. Retrieved 5 February 2012.
  45. ↑ "National Grid Initiatives (NGIs): Slovenia". DC-Net. 23 February 2011. Retrieved 10 October 2012.
  46. ↑ "Home". Arctur. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  47. ↑ Krivec, Rajmund (2007). "Infopages v2". www-f1.ijs.si. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  48. ↑ "F9 IJS in EGEE: SiGNET". www-f9.ijs.si (in Slovenian). Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  49. ↑ Cimerman, Sandi. "Equipment". r4.ijs.si. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  50. ↑ "IBM - BSC Collaboration". Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  51. ↑ "Triolith - the fastest supercomputer in the Nordics". National Supercomputer Centre. 20 November 2013. Archived from the original on 21 February 2014. Retrieved 17 February 2014.
  52. ↑ "NSC to install Scandinavia's most powerful supercomputer". National Supercomputer Centre. 18 April 2018. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  53. ↑ "Beskow - Cray XC40, Xeon E5-2695v4/E5-2698v3 16C 2.3GHz, Aries interconnect". TOP500. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  54. ↑ "Europe's third fastest supercomputing center". ETH Zurich. 23 June 2009. Archived from the original on 29 September 2011. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  55. ↑ "Swiss National Supercomputing Centre Orders First Next-Generation Cray XMT Supercomputer". Marketwire. 18 February 2011. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  56. ↑ "IBM Hot Water-Cooled Supercomputer Goes Live at ETH Zurich". HPC Wire. 2 July 2010. Archived from the original on 15 March 2012. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  57. ↑ LaMonica, Martin (10 May 2010). "IBM liquid-cooled supercomputer heats building". CNET. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  58. ↑ "EPCC History". University of Edinburgh. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  59. ↑ Randerson, James (2 January 2008). "Inside the UK's fastest machine". The Guardian. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  60. ↑ "About ARCHER". ARCHER. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
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