Open Technologies and Institute of mathematics and mechanics OURO RAHN upgraded the URAN supercomputer

The company Open Technologies, the Russian system integrator, OURO RAHN announces project completion of upgrade of the URAN supercomputer at Institute of mathematics and mechanics. Peak capacity of the supercomputer was increased about 160 TFlops, and performance by Linpack till 75.20 TFlops that allowed it to take the fifth position in the list of 50 most powerful supercomputers of the CIS.

The URAN supercomputer was created in 2009 for the purpose of providing institutes OURO RAHN, higher education institutions and industrial enterprises of the Urals by computing resources of modern level. Peak capacity of the created cluster was 3 TFlops, real — 2.36 TFlops. At creation the bleyd-server platform of HP BladeSystem c7000 and 32 dual-processor nodes of HP of Proliant BL 460c on quad-core Intel Xeon 5450 microprocessors with clock rate of 3.0 GHz was used.

From the moment of creation the supercomputer was actively used for the solution of scientific and practical tasks. Average loading working in the round-the-clock mode, including days off, the calculator made 70%.

Active users were hundreds of employees from several tens organizations:

• Institute of mathematics and mechanics OURO RAHN,
• Institute of physics of metals OURO RAHN,
• Institute of thermophysics OURO RAHN,
• Institute of engineering science OURO RAHN,
• Institute of chemistry of a solid body OURO RAHN,
• Institute of high-temperature electrochemistry OURO RAHN,
• Institute of mechanics of continuous mediums OURO RAHN,
• Institute of applied mechanics OURO RAHN,
• Ural Federal University,
• Udmurt state university and mn. other.

Among tasks which solution was provided by the supercomputer it is possible to celebrate a research of algorithms of optimum control of the rocket carrier of the class "SOYuZ-2", modeling of internal dynamics of Earth, structural analysis of images of objects in space pictures of the land surface, creation of a mathematical model of heart and modeling of gas-hydrodynamic processes in engines.

In 2011 average loading of the URAN supercomputer increased to 80%, queue of tasks grew. Became obvious that the available computing powers are not enough. Therefore the decision on upgrade of "URANIUM" was made.

The new computing field of the supercomputer was decided to be built on the basis of hybrid architecture using the graphic processors of general purpose of NVIDIA company exceeding central processors on peak capacity several times, but at the same time having lower cost and energy consumption.

Tender for creation of a computing field of hybrid architecture was won by the company Open Technologies.

The system integrator jointly with specialists of Institute of mathematics and mechanics OURO RAHN developed the solution providing the maximum density of placement of the equipment. At the same time already existing equipment of the supercomputer was completely compatible to new that allowed to save earlier invested capital.

For expansion of the supercomputer the ProLiant s6500 HP platform with HP servers of Proliant SL390s G7 was selected, in each of which it was set on 8 GPU NVIDIA Tesla.

As a result the peak capacity of "URANIUM" increased to 160 TFlops, and performance by Linpack till 75.20 TFlops.

According to Andrey Sozykin managing the sector of supercomputer technologies of Institute of mathematics and mechanics OURO RAHN "the supercomputer of hybrid architecture using graphic processors was demanded at once by our users thanks to existence of a large number of ready application program packages (including free) for parallel computings with support of GPU".