Prometheus on the TOP500 list

Prometheus – the fastest Polish supercomputer

Prometheus with its 2,4 PFLOPS of theoretical performance has been listed at 103rd position. This top-efficient supercomputer located in Poland has been built by Hewlett-Packard according to requirements and partial design provided by Cyfronet. To date, Prometheus is one of the biggest installations of this type in the world and also the first one in Europe, based on the latest technology of direct liquid cooling.

Prometheus consists of more than 2,200 servers based on HP Apollo8000 platform, combined with super-fast InfiniBand network with 56 Gbit/s capacity. Its energy saving and high-performance Intel Haswell latest-generation processors offer more than 53,000 cores. These are accompanied by 282 TB RAM in total, and by two storage file systems of 10 PB total capacity, and 180 GB/s access speed. Prometheus has been also equipped with NVIDIA Tesla GPGPUs.

To illustrate Prometheus' speed, one would have to harness the power of more than 50,000 first-class PCs, in their strongest configuration, additionally connected to super-fast network and managed by special software, to catch up with its abilities – says prof. Wiatr, Director of ACC Cyfronet AGH. Thanks to the innovative technology of direct liquid cooling, Prometheus is also one of the most energy-efficient computers in its class in the world. Its PUE factor is comparable with some of the largest data centres in the world, such as Google or Facebook. Furthermore, liquid cooling allows for extremely high installation density, therefore Prometheus, weighing of more than 40 tons, covers 18m² area and is placed on 20 racks only. To achieve the same computing power in case of Zeus (Prometheus' predecessor), it would have to take about 160 racks. Baribal, the predecessor of Zeus, with computing power of 1,5 TFLOPS was placed on 8 racks. To achieve the computing power of Prometheus it would take as many as 12,000 Baribal's racks – points Cyfronet's Director.

The Prometheus architecture responds to the diverse needs of researchers by providing coomputing resources organized in partitions:

• classical cluster of computing servers with highly efficient CPU nodes equipped with Intel Xeon processors,
• acceleration partition with a set of devices supporting the Prometheus configuration with several types of accelerators (including GPGPU NVIDIA K80, Intel Xeon Phi 7120P, and Nallatech FPGA cards),
• set of servers designed for Cloud computing.

Polish scientists can use Prometheus among others for:

• data results analysis,
• numerical simulations,
• advanced visualisations provision,
• (big) data processing,
• cloud computing and many other services.

Prometheus has been installed in a high-tech computing room, exclusively adapted for its operation. The supercomputer's proper functioning is additionally supported by the accompanying infrastructure, including such systems as guaranteed power supply with an additional generator, modern air-conditioning and gas extinguishing.

Zeus supports Prometheus

For less demanding computing tasks, supercomputer Zeus still offers its computing power. The heterogeneous architecture of this supercomputer consisting of four dedicated hardware partitions provides more than 25,000 computing cores and 204 GPGPUs with total theoretical computational power of 374 TFLOPS. This is accompanied by 60 TB of RAM and 2.3 PB of disk storage. Zeus is built of over 1,300 individual blade servers, interconnected via high-speed 40 Gb/s InfiniBand network.

It is worth noting that in 2017 the two most powerful supercomputers in ACK Cyfronet AGH – Zeus and Prometheus, executed 9 066 892 jobs with a total duration of 39 232 years of CPU time.

Scientific calculations from different fields

Access to the Prometheus and Zeus resources is done via the PLGrid infrastructure – Polish nationwide computing infrastructure for scientific research in silico (performed with the help of computers). Dedicated computing environments, so-called domain grids, and specialised IT platforms enable conduction of increasingly complex research problems. The research portfolio carried out with the help of Zeus and, recently, Prometheus is quite reach. It includes: modeling of distributed high-frequency ultrasonic wave in skin tissue, study of new RNA forms in human glioblastomas or preparation of a LINAC device simulator for cancer therapy. Computations are performed regarding studies of wood-glass composite beams subjected to repeatedly variable loads, analysis of two-component dark matter in the MRSSM model, simulations of modules and thermoelectric generators operation, determination of neutron electric dipole moment as well as numerical analysis of the reaction of selected engineering structures for kinematic extortion of mining origin. Scientific computations do not include simulations only. Computing power is utilised by Polish scientists also within international projects, including experiments like CTA, LOFAR, EPOS, Large Hadron Collider in CERN and the recently discovered gravitational waves in LIGO and VIRGO detectors.

Supercomputers enable to significantly reduce time of computations that using a single computer would often take many years (in specific cases more than 150, 700 or even 1000 years). Here they may be usually performed within a few days. Cyfronet users can benefit from the professional support – starting from full documentation, through training, to individual consultations with experts. Information concerning the use of the Prometheus and Zeus resources by scientists is available on http://www.cyfronet.pl. and http://www.plgrid.pl. It is worth to register in the PLGrid portal https://portal.plgrid.pl and use many unique services.

Supercomputers from Poland on TOP500 list

The June 2018 edition of TOP500 spots also 3 other supercomputers installed in Polish computing centres and research institutes. The full list of Polish supercomputers on TOP500 is as follows:

• 103 – Prometheus, ACC Cyfronet AGH,
• 259 – Eagle, PSNC, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poznan,
• 263 – Tryton, TASK, Technical University Gdańsk,
• 320 – Okeanos, ICM, University of Warsaw.

Fastest in the world

For the first time, Summit – the supercomputer from USA – took the first position on TOP500, with more than 187.6 PFLOPS of computational power (theoretical). The list is dominated by supercomputers from China (206 units) and USA (124 units). The fastest European supercomputer was ranked in the 6th position.