Installation of Louhi proceeds

05.02.2007

The installation of the first phase of CSC’s new Cray XT4 supercomputer, louhi.csc.fi, has been completed and the acceptance tests of Louhi have begun. These include running functionality tests, performance benchmarks and selected application software.

The acceptance tests are estimated to last at least one month. If the tests are passed on schedule, Louhi will be opened for CSC’s customers in late March or in April.

Louhi will be reserved for large parallel jobs requiring high computational power. The jobs can normally be run with a minimum of 64 and a maximum of 512 computational cores. Special arrangements for grand challenge problems requesting more than 512 cores can be made.

The users will need to prove the good scalability of their codes on Louhi by documented test runs. A special batch queue of 2-128 cores for short tests will be created to be used for both program development and scalability tests.

The first phase of CSC’s Cray XT4 contains 1012 compute nodes, each having a dual-core AMD Opteron processor with 2.6 GHz clock frequency. There is 1 GB of RAM memory per each core. The system has Fortran, C and C++ compilers (Portland, GCC, etc.), MPI, the ACML and LibSci math libraries, the TotalView debugger and Cray profiling tools for program development. The batch job system is PBS Pro.

There will be a Cray workshop for the Louhi users at CSC on March 5-8, 2007. More information on the workshop can be found at http://www.csc.fi/english/csc/courses/crayworkshop.

The installation of CSC’s HP XC supercluster murska.csc.fi will begin in February, and the system will be taken in customer use during the first half of the year 2007.

More information on the installation of the new systems, and on applying user accounts for them, will be published later.

Further information: Totti Mäkelä, tel. (09) 457 2055, email: totti.makela@csc.fi