With the upgrade of the Dutch supercomputer Huygens, the system must, from 2014, a computing have completed. n petaflop. The first part of the planned upgrade of the cluster must be the beginning of 2012 are ready.
Wednesday, it was announced that minister Verhagen of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation 7 million opzijzet for high-performance systems in the Netherlands. A part of this budget will be used for an upgrade for the Huygens supercomputer, which at the research centre SARA in Amsterdam. SARA-director dr. ir Anwar Osseyran is expected that this and future upgrades undertake to lead that Huygens users in mid-2014 a computing power of 1 petaflop, or a quadrillion floating-point operations per second, can provide.
That computing power will more than be sufficient for a listing in the top 500 of supercomputers, such as the ministry wants. Osseyran is, however, not to the rankings, but to use. “The netherlands is perhaps not in the top 50, but we have sufficient capacity for our scientists and the knowledge-based economy is adequate to support,” he says Tweakers.net.
Currently, the Japanese “K Computer” in Kobe the first place. That cluster already has a computing power of more than 10 petaflop. The number two on the list, the Chinese Tianhe-1A, with 2,56 petaflop all with a lot less brute force. As Huygens already over 1 petaflop would have, would the system just outside the top ten, but in 2014, there are likely much more powerful systems.
“The listing in the top-500 list, is not our primary goal,” says Osseyran again. “We want to be a good business starting point to ensure and sufficient computing power to offer to our users. Within the framework of the available resources are some of the options viewed. The focus is to have the existing investments in expertise and software to make optimal use and the best architecture for the Dutch applications to choose.”
SARA enumerates now where the users need to have. So are the 25 largest users visited and the most important applications are analyzed. Also looking at what future technology would best suit the needs. Huygens must then in the first half of 2012, the first upgrade to get.
It is not the first time that the cluster service that the performance needs polishing. The national supercomputer, in 2007 we purchased and then had a performance of 14 teraflops. In 2008, it underwent Huygens upgrade to the current 62,5 teraflops.
The netherlands is no longer present in the top 500 supercomputers, while in 2008, there were five rekenmonsters on Dutch soil there. Belgium is still present on the list: the Financial Institution, an iDataPlex system, IBM, at 291. Huygens is currently the most powerful of the Dutch system with a computing capacity of 65 teraflops, the second-fastest Dutch supercomputer is currently the BlueGene/P at the University of Groningen and who has a computing power of 41.8 teraflops.
