The Australian Raijin supercomputer became more powerful thanks to IBM Power Systems

National computer center of Australia (National Computational Infrastructure, NCI) in November, 2017 announced integration of opportunities servers IBM Power Systems with the existing architecture supercomputer of x86 Raijin.

According to IBM company, NCI for the first time implemented technology based on an open architecture and IBM Power Systems for high-performance computing in the data processing center. The solution is designed to increase flexibility, to increase the level of optimization and performance to satisfy needs of the Australian researchers

IBM Power Systems will allow to optimize scientific modeling using the Raijin supercomputer — Dave Turek, the vice president of division of Exascale Systems in IBM commented. — Improbable capacity of Power Systems will provide much higher performance.

Staff of NCI together with scientific community of Australia revealed a number of the applications which are actively using memory and transferred them to architecture of IBM. Thanks to the optimizing efforts of the NCI command these applications showed high performance on the Power Systems platform.

In particular, NCI ported the quantum and chemical software of Q-Chem on Power Systems. The first results of this optimization exceeded indicators of similar applications based on architecture of Broadwell x86 that offers new prospects to chemical modeling specialists.

Moreover, code optimization of molecular dynamics of NAMD for the Power Systems servers provided higher performance in comparison with existing solutions based on architecture of Broadwell x86. On a withdrawal of NCI, the first results of work of MILC based on Power Systems also showed both moderate, and essential advantages over systems based on x86.

Software of Q-Chem functions along with more than 3 thousand other applications which are already optimized by HPC the NCI command for systems based on x86 and GPU which form Raijin basis. NCI intend to continue optimization of other applications for scientific research using Power Systems to satisfy needs of scientists.

In general, according to the statement of IBM, NCI will become one of the first organizations which will integrate architecture of Power and x86 in a single system of planning. Such approach will provide a variety, availability and freedom of choice for researchers who use high-performance computing of NCI. The IBM Power Systems servers are available in present PBSPro the scheduler and are integrated into LDAP and systems of accounting of NCI.

In addition, using switches Mellanox EDR and FDR at data transfer rate to 100 Gbps the Power Systems servers will open access more than to 40PB of the operational Lustre storage which is already used on other platforms of Raijin.