14 DAY TRIAL // Top500 is the list which ranks the world's supercomputers in terms of raw power, but it's only half of the picture. The other half is the Green500 list, which contains the world's most efficient HPC installations. It turns out that AMD had a big stake in the best one's creation.
There used to be a time when supercomputers were mostly about processors and memory. In theory, this has remained the same. In practice, however, CPU cores aren't the only important thing anymore.
GPU compute modules, which are PCI Express cards with graphics processing units installed on the PCBs, have proven quite useful here as well.
That's where NVIDIA Tesla and AMD FirePro compute accelerators come in. In fact, AMD's FirePro S9150 is going to be our main topic today.
AMD powers the best Green500 supercomputer
GSI has a research facility at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH research facility in Darmstadt, Germany.
There, the L-CSC cluster is located, a supercomputer with a performance of 5.27 GFLOPS per watt and over 3 petaflops total GPU performance. That's 3.25 petaFLOPS single precision and 1.62 petaFLOPS double precision performance at peak operation. Maybe even close to 1.7 petaFLOPS on a good day.
That means nearly 1.7 quadrillion floating point operations per second in double precision configuration, which is the fourth-fastest supercomputer performance in Germany.
ASUS, the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS), and GSI all worked together to set it up, with official deployment happening earlier this month (November 2014).
There are 600 AMD FirePro S92150 server GPUs inside the cluster, and the combined efficiency is 20% better than the one provided by the top winner of the June 2014 Green500 list.
That's a pretty big deal, and a pretty high bar for NVIDIA to measure up against, now that the Tesla K80 card has been formally released. While we can see that super-board powering the next Top500 winner, the Green500 list might prove more of a challenge.
On a related note, AMD Opteron server CPUs were used in the second best Top500 winner.
What the GSI L-CSC cluster will be used for
The AMD FirePro-powered supercomputer is capable of Lattice Quantum Chromo Dynamics (Lattice QCD) computational research. Practically any sort of calculation can be done, though visualization and virtualization are bound to benefit the most. Good in chemistry, biological engineering, astronomy, quantum physics (this one will probably get priority, given GSI's research focus), etc.
