University of Frankfurt Selects Bright Cluster Manager to Manage 20,784 Processor Supercomputer

May 31, 2010 - PRLog -- San Jose, California — Bright Computing, specialist in cluster management software and services for high-performance computing (HPC), is pleased to announce that Bright Cluster Manager has been selected to manage the new flagship supercomputer of the Goethe University's Hessian high-performance computer organisation (HHLR-GU). This supercomputer called "LOEWE-CSC" has 20,784 processor cores plus 772 GPGPU hardware accelerators, which adds up to a theoretical peak performance of 599 TeraFLOPs (599 trillion calculations per second) in double precision and 2259 TeraFLOPS in single precision. On today's TOP500 list of fastest computers in the world, LOEWE-CSC could rank amongst the top 15.

Scientists at the Goethe University and in the state of Hessen will be using LOEWE-CSC for a wide range of scientific research, ranging from theoretical physics and chemistry to life sciences and computer science. This research is supported amongst others by the Frankfurt Cluster of Excellence for Macromolecular Complexes (CEF-MC), the LOEWE Helmholtz International Centre (HIC) for FAIR, the LOEWE Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiKF), the Transregio SFB 49 Condensed Matter Systems with Variable Many-Body Interactions, the Frankfurt Bernstein Focus Neurotechnology DMSPiN, and the Hessian Quantum Chemistry Initiative.

"This supercomputer represents a new era for high-performance computing at the University of Frankfurt. The LOEWE-CSC supercomputer will allow us to run a large range of scientific applications at an unprecedented scale, but also at a ground-breaking performance-to-power-consumption ratio," said professor Volker Lindenstruth, Chair of HPC Architecture at the Goethe University. "We are pleased to run Bright Cluster Manager on the LOEWE-CSC system because it has already proven itself on another TOP500-class supercomputer at our university."

The supercomputer will be built by ClusterVision using Bright Cluster Manager™ as the cluster management software, which is unique due to its built-in functionality for large and complex HPC clusters. At the heart of the cluster will be 386 units of 2U Supermicro GPU-optimised Twin servers with two hot-plug nodes each, 1544 AMD Opteron 12-core "Magny-Cours" CPUs, 772 ATI Radeon GPGPUs, and QDR Mellanox InfiniBand. The supercomputer will also have 420 TeraBytes of disk storage from Dell with an extremely fast, 10GB/s, parallel FhGFS filesystem from the Fraunhofer Institute ITWM in Kaiserslautern.

About the HHLR-GU
The Goethe-University's Hessian high performance computer organisation (HHLR-GU) coordinates all IT and HPC activities at the Goethe University. Part of HHLR-GU is the Center for Scientific Computing, which was founded as a joint initiative of research groups from the university departments Physics, Chemistry, Biochemistry and Pharmacy, Geosciences, Computer Science and Mathematics, and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS). The mission of the CSC is HPC support for the scientific community and education in Computational Science. The CSC organises the interdisciplinary master program Computational Science and regular seminars. It will also operate the new flagship computer LOEWE-CSC.

About Bright Computing
Bright Computing is a specialist in cluster management software and services for high-performance computing (HPC). Its flag-ship product — Bright Cluster Manager — makes clusters of any size easy to install, use and manage, and is the cluster management solution of choice for many universities, research institutes and companies across the world. Bright Computing has its head office in San Jose, California.

Pictures and screenshots of Bright Cluster Manager:
http://www.BrightComputing.com/Newsroom.php

For more information:
Bright Computing, Inc.
Press Office
2880 Zanker Road, Suite 203
San Jose, CA 95134
USA
Tel: +1 408 954 7325
Fax: +1 408 715 0102
info@BrightComputing.com

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Bright Computing is a specialist in cluster management software and services for high-performance computing (HPC). Its flag-ship product — Bright Cluster Manager — makes clusters of any size easy to install, use and manage.