Prometheus supercomputer took 174th position on the TOP500 list

Prometheus – number one among Polish supercomputers

Prometheus with its 2,4 PFlops of theoretical performance has been listed at 174^th position. This top-efficient supercomputer located in Poland has been built by Hewlett-Packard according to requirements and partial design provided by Cyfronet.

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 DDR4 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. This was achieved by using the cooling water having a temperature of 28°C. To cool down the water to such a temperature in our climate it is enough to use cheap in use dry-coolers, instead of ice water generators, consuming relatively large amounts of electricity and technologically advanced precision air conditioning systems. The liquid cools both CPU and GPGPU processors as well as memory modules using a special hermetic system of heat pipes and contact heat transfer between the servers and the system in which the liquid circulates. The servers themselves remain "dry" – they can be removed at any time without the risk of liquid leakage in the cooling system. Liquid cooling has also made it possible to achieve a very high installation density of up to 144 computing servers in a single rack.

The Prometheus PUE factor is comparable with some of the largest data centres in the world, such as Google, Amazon 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 computing resources organized in partitions:

• classical cluster of computing servers with highly efficient CPU nodes equipped with Intel Xeon Haswell and Intel Xeon Gold processors,
• cluster of servers equipped with graphic accelerators GPGPU NVIDIA Tesla K40 XL,
• acceleration partition including GPGPU NVIDIA K80 cards as well as Intel Xeon Phi 7120P and Nallatech FPGA accelerators,
• set of servers designed for Cloud computing.

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 2018 the two most powerful supercomputers in ACK Cyfronet AGH – Zeus and Prometheus, executed 8 342 686 jobs with a total duration of 42 436 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.

Scientists conducting research with use of the Cyfronet infrastructure represent many fields. Advanced modeling and numerical calculations are used mainly in: physics, chemistry, biology, medicine and material technology, as well as in astronomy, geology and environmental protection. Research topics include: the use of neural networks in high energy physics and for the detection of tumor metastasis, cancer neoplasm analysis, neurotransmitter release simulation and protein generation, DFT calculations and aluminosilicate modeling. Researchers also conduct analyzes of wind turbines and boat hulls, analyzes of images using quantum methods or the process of thermal energy storage.

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.

Use the power of supercomputers in scientific research

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 access to 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 compared to Europe and the world

Summit – the supercomputer from USA – again took the first position on TOP500, with more than 200 PFlops of computational power (theoretical). The list is dominated by supercomputers from China (219 units) and USA (116 units). It is worth noting that the total computing power of supercomputers from USA exceeds the computing power of those from China.

The European countries having supercomputers on the list (15 countries including Russia) occupied a total of 98 positions. The fastest European supercomputer is Piz Daint from Switzerland, ranked 6th. The top ten list also includes a supercomputer from Germany, SuperMUC-NG, in the 9^th position. The countries in Europe with the largest number of supercomputers on the TOP500 list are: France (19 units), Great Britain (18 units),  and Germany (14 units).

Prometheus is the only supercomputer from Poland on the June 2019 edition of the TOP500 list.