Research projects on the Hitachi SR8000-F1 (2000-2001)

In the first quarter of 2000, Leibniz-Rechenzentrum (LRZ) Munich has installed a Hitachi SR8000-F1 machine intended to serve as German Federal Top-Level Compute Server in Bavaria (the German acronym HLRB will be used in the following); this machine will be augmented by more than half its computing power in a second installation phase in 2Q2002. Even in the first phase, LRZ is now operating the fastest computer within Europe. The decision to purchase the Hitachi machine was based on the results of state-of-the-art HPC application benchmarks performed in summer 1999 which took into consideration that the required system should offer optimal performance for real-world applications. In phase I the new system will encompass 112 nodes containing 8 CPUs each. Each of these pseudo-vector nodes yields 12 GFlops peak performance and contains 8 Gigabytes memory, with the exception of four nodes which are supplied with 16 Gigabytes memory each. Thus the total machine has a peak performance of 1.3 TFlops. The nodes are interconnected via a three-dimensional crossbar with a bandwidth of 950 MB/s between nodes and a latency (i.e., communication lag of first message between nodes) of 19 microseconds. Further details of the hardware of the machine - especially for phase II - are given in a table in the next section. Usage of the HLRB is open to projects from Germany, the completion of which is required from scientific necessity but simultaneously not feasible on any other existing computing platforms. Thus, in contrast to the other computing platforms available at LRZ, there is no default access to the HLRB for Bavarian universities; instead, resources are allocated to individual projects via a refereeing process. Emphasis is put on codes which are easily vectorized, however the SR8000 architecture is sufficiently flexible that the system may be used as an MPP as well. This report gives a short description of all major projects that are using or have been using the HLRB so far. An online overview with further links to reports and publications of the projects can be found in http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/projekte/hlrb-projects. target=NewWindow> http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/projekte/hlrb-projects. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RN 2900(2001-02) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman