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Tonko Racic Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) was founded as a polytechnic university by the Federal government in 1854 and opened in Zurich in 1855. The ETH itself comprises 83 institutes and laboratories, 330 professorships and about 840 lecturers who fulfill teaching obligations and conduct research. A staff of more then 7500 work in teaching, research and administration. Currently ETH hosts 11,700 registered students. ETH covers the entire educational spectrum of engineering, the natural sciences, architecture and mathematics. HP/Exemplar X2000/32 "sella" has been at ETHZ since March 97, and it's purpose is engineering and scientific computing. Some 350 scientist and students have an account on "sella", with an average load of 80%. Most used applications are MARC, Gaussian and ABAQUS. The growing computing-power demand, the frozen SPP-UX and a decrease in third-party software being ported (upgraded) to this platform, forced us to look for the successor machine. |
Easy migrations path, binary compatibility, good user acceptance for the HP's SCA (ccNUMA) architecture and a large number of third-party scientific applications running on HP-UX led us to continue with HP. We have chosen HP V2500-SCA two nodes configuration, with single processor boards (16 CPUs per node), 8GB of shared memory per node. This is a total of 32 CPUs and 16GB of shared memory. In December 99 ETHZ was the first site in Europe to receive the HP V2500-SCA running HP-UX 11.10 (beta). After tuning the system to meet our load requirements, and getting the new machine running stably, some of our most used applications on the Exemplar have been installed on the new V2500-SCA "tornado". In order to get the real picture of how the new machine performs under production load, we have asked some of our users to run their calculations on both machines. The results will be presented at the conference. Even if not of significant importance for us on this particular machine, but of general interest, we have done some latency and bandwidth measurement with MPI using COMMS1 from PARKBENCH. For the memory bandwidth benchmarks we have used Matmul and FFT. |