By: Michael Feldman

The National Supercomputer Centre (NSC) at Linköping University is gearing up to deploy a four-petaflop ClusterVision system, which will make it the most powerful supercomputer in Scandinavia.

The system, named Tetralith, will be comprised of 1,892 servers, each outfitted with 32 cores of Intel CPUs, and hooked together with the Omni-Path interconnect. The plan is to construct Tetralith in stages, beginning this summer. By August, the university hopes to have the first stage up and running, with the entire system installed by November. In parallel with the deployment of the new supercomputer, its predecessor will be dismantled. That system, known as Triolith, was intially installed in 2012 and upgraded the following year.

 

Triolith supercomputer. Photo credit: Thor Balkhed

 

After all the dust is settled, the university will have a supercomputer with four times the performance as the one it replaced and nearly twice as powerful as Sweden’s current top system, a 2.4-petaflop Cray XC40 installed at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. “It’s very gratifying to see that Sweden is investing heavily in remaining at the forefront of providing computer resources,” says Philipp Schlatter, docent at KTH and chair of the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) resource allocation committee.

Tetralith will be used by Swedish researchers across a wide range of scientific domains, including chemistry, biology, materials science, physics, fluid dynamics, and climate research, among others. According to Matts Karlsson, professor at Linköping University and director of NSC, the center is experiencing an increase in computing demand by researchers, and not just for traditional HPC workloads. “New areas such as machine learning and artificial intelligence require increasing amounts of computing power,” noted Karlsson.

The system was funded by the SNIC consortium of 10 universities and the Swedish Research Council, who each contributed half of the SEK 150 million cost of the machine. Once online, Tetralith will be available to all Swedish university researchers, with allocations managed by SNIC.