ETH Zurich relies on Intel and NEC to accelerate research

ETH Zurich, one of the most prestigious polytechnic universities in Switzerland and one of the world’s most important research centres, has implemented a new supercomputer, delivered by NEC Europe Ltd., which is based on the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v2 product family , code-named Ivy-Bridge, to speed up research in areas such as biomedicine, astronomy, geophysics, theoretical physics, material science, and computational science.

The cluster began operating in the new state-of-the-art Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano at the beginning of October 2013. CSCS specialises in operating large high-performance computing (HPC) systems using a very efficient and sustainable infrastructure. CSCS hosts and manages this cluster on behalf of the professors of ETH Zurich.

“Being able to perform multiple highly complex calculations in a short time and with little error is critical to the success of our work groups. Today, computer simulations are the best way to get results more quickly by testing theoretical models a priori and thereby reducing the trial costs,” said Prof. Michele Parrinello of ETH Zurich, known for his work on computational modelling in the field of molecular dynamics. “With the new supercomputer based on the Intel Xeon processor E5 family, our researchers save time and will be able to perform multiple calculations simultaneously and have a higher chance of getting useful results, with significant benefits for the advancement of research projects,” continued Parrinello. “These new computational resources will allow us to explore aspects that would otherwise be impossible to investigate, and quickly validate or reject the various hypotheses in the study, with obvious advantages for the advancement of our scientific knowledge.”

The new supercomputer at CSCS is based on NEC’s LX-series* HPC cluster solution, which is designed to meet the requirements of the most difficult compute-tasks in industry and science, and which is specifically configured and customized for each individual project. Besides administration- and login-nodes, the configuration of the NEC supercomputer consists of 336 dual-socket compute nodes based on the Intel Xeon processor E5 family, with a total peak performance of more than 118 TFlops. In addition, NEC provides a storage component based on its advanced customised Lustre-implementation with a capacity of more than 300 TByte and a bandwidth-capability of more than 15 GByte/s (Streaming). Benchmarks to select the system were a sample of real science applications used by ETH Zurich scientists.

“NEC’s basic strategy in the high-performance-computing business is to focus on the users and their needs, aiming to achieve high sustained performance on real user codes to get scientific results,” said Bruno Lecointe, Senior Sales Manager, high performance computing europe, NEC Europe Ltd. “NEC wants to be a partner of science, not just a hardware vendor. We are closely cooperating with scientific users to understand the challenges they are facing and to address those challenges with our products.”

“The 22 nm Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v2 product family, particularly suitable for high performance computing, delivers up to 45% greater efficiency and up to 50% higher performance than the previous generation,” said Isabelle Flory enterprise solution director Intel Western Europe. “The scientific research conducted by the work groups at ETH Zurich is an applicative environment where processing capabilities can really make a difference, and our hope is that with Intel we can obtain better results faster and at lower cost.”

“Our clients win on all aspects with the new Intel Xeon processor E5 family provided by NEC: lower operational costs due to the reduced power consumption, increased memory bandwidth, increased throughput and faster time to solution. Performance improvements over previous generation Intel Xeon processors demonstrated faster timings up to 30% on a per-node basis,” said Luc Corbeil, head of the high-performance computing solutions team at CSCS. "We found in NEC and Intel collaborators with solid HPC know-how. They provided a complete cluster solution that our clients will benefit from for several years of scientific computing.”