Communications of the ACM
Supercomputer Boosted With Graphic Processors
The new Piz Daint supercomputer under development by the Swiss National Supercomputing Center is being extended with graphic processing units.
Credit: CSCS
The Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) is developing Piz Daint, a new supercomputer system that will provide the necessary compute performance and consume less power than the CSCS' current flagship supercomputing system, Monte Rosa.
Piz Daint is being extended with graphic processing units (GPUs). As part of the extension, one of two conventional processors (CPUs) located on a computer node is being replaced by a GPU. The new supercomputer receives much of its overall performance and efficiency from a novel interconnecting network between compute nodes.
"Given the ever-growing demands of computer models, we can only contain energy consumption in supercomputing with a radical change in computer architecture," says CSCS director Thomas Schulthess.
Initial testing shows that a climate simulation on Piz Daint runs more than three times faster and finds a solution with seven times less energy consumed compared to Monte Rosa.
Although accelerator processors often remain unused in real simulations because they cannot be used effectively with the legacy computer codes and algorithms, several computing centers have recently implemented them successfully into supercomputers, according to Schulthess.
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