PLAN-E Workshop Switzerland Welcome! September 8, 2016
The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre Driving innovation in computational research in Switzerland Michele De Lorenzi (CSCS) PLAN-E September 8, 2016
CSCS in a nutshell Established in 1991 as a unit of ETH Zurich 73 highly qualified staff from 14 nations Develops and operates the key supercomputing capabilities required to solve important problems to science and/or society Leads the national strategy for High-Performance Computing and Networking (HPCN) that was passed by Swiss Parliament in 2009 Has a dedicated User Laboratory for supercomputing since 2011 (i.e. research infrastructure funded by the ETH Domain on a programmatic basis) ~1000 users, 200 projects (2016) The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre 3
CSCS hedgehog concept High-Performance Computing (HPC): Scientific computing and data processing where performance matters Supercomputers: Most powerful general purpose HPC systems at any given time CSCS develops and provides the key supercomputing capabilities required to solve important problems to science and/or society The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre 4
High-risk & high-impact projects Application driven co-design of pre-exascale supercomputing ecosystem 2016 2017 Monte Rosa Cray XT5 14 762 cores Upgrade to Cray XE6 47,200 cores 2014 2015 Upgrade Hex-core upgrade 22 128 cores 2011 2012 2013 Development & procurement of petaflop/s scale supercomputer 2009 2010 Begin construction of new building New building complete Three pronged approach of the HPCN Initiative 1. New, flexible, and efficient building 2. Efficient supercomputers 3. Efficient applications The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre 5
User Lab 6
The users of CSCS Scientific users can access CSCS computing resources for free They have to submit project requests that are assessed by international experts 1.2 billions computing hours have been used in 2015 CSCS operates third party systems for paying customers MeteoSwiss to compute the numerical weather forecasts The physicists of the Swiss universities to analyse the data from the LHC experiment at CERN The Blue Brain 4, an IBM Blue Gene/Q acquired from the Blue Brain Project (EPFL Lausanne) ETH Zurich professors from various fields The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre 7
Users by scientific field - 2015 The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre 8
Users by organisation - 2015 The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre 9
Example co-design Project MeteoSwiss NExT Cosmo Suite 10
Improving simulation quality requires higher performance what exactly and by how much? Current model running through mid 2016 New model starting operation on in 2016 COSMO-2 (2.2 km grid) 24h forecast running in 30 min. 8x per day COSMO-1 (1.1 km grid) 24h forecast running in 30 min. 8x per day (~10x COSMO-2) COSMO-2E (21 times 2.2 km grid) 21-member ensemble,120h forecast in 150 min., 2x per day (~26x COSMO-2) KENDA 40-member ensemble,1h forecast in 15 min., 24x per day (~5x COSMO-2) New production system must deliver ~40x the simulations performance of existing HPC system
Origin of factor 40 performance improvement Current production system installed in 2012 New Piz Kesch/Escha installed in 2015 Processor performance Improved system utilisation General software performance Port to GPU architecture Increase in number of processors Total performance improvement 2.8 x ß Moore s law 2.8 x 1.7 x ß Software refactoring 2.3 x 1.3 x ~ 40 x Bonus: simulation running on GPU is 3x more energy efficient compared to conventional state of the art CPU The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre 12
COSMO-2 vs COSMO-1 The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre 13
Co-Design together with MeteoSchweiz Domain science Computer engineering Das Hochleistungsrechenzentrum der Schweiz 14
The supercomputers of CSCS 15
25 years of supercomputers at CSCS 1991 NEC SX3 5.5 GF Adula 1996 NEC SX4 10 GF Gottardo 1999 NEC SX5 64 GF Prometeo 2002 IBM SP4 1.3 TF Venus 2005 Cray XT3 5.8 TF Palu 2006 IBM P5 4.5 TF Blanc 2009-12 Cray XE6 402 TF Monte Rosa 2012-13 Cray XC30 7.7 PF Piz Daint The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre 16
Piz Daint Cray XC30 Operational since April 2013 Extension and upgrade to hybrid in late 2013 5 272 dual-socket nodes with Intel Xeon CPU and NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU 168 TB RAM 2.7 PB local disk The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre 17
Getting ready for the site visit 18
Overview The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre 19
The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre 20
The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre 21
Thanks for your attention. cscsch 22