[December 13, 2011] Finnish Grid Infrastructure: new distributed computing capacity from HP for science Tweet (ENP Newswire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) ENP Newswire - 13 December 2011 Release date- 12122011 - CSC - IT Center for Science together with nine Finnish universities has formed the Finnish Grid Infrastructure (FGI) consortium, which has in turn purchased a distributed national computing cluster from Hewlett-Packard. This distributed resource is a significant increase in the computing capacity available for Finnish researchers. It forms a computational grid consisting of ten separate installations at the participating universities' sites. The aggregated theoretical peak capacity would raise the system to the supercomputer TOP 500 list which is used to rank top HPC systems in the world. The purchase was made possible by the Academy of Finland, which granted 1.4 million Euros through its FIRI2010 Infrastructure call for the purpose. Together with the in-kind funding from the universities the total funding is above two million Euros. The future of computing lies in utilizing the immense data transferring capacity of the research networks (e.g. FUNET) to distribute the data processing in part or even in total to non local computers. This approach was pioneered by particle physicists, who developed the Grid computing technology that allows distribution of both data and computing to a worldwide seamless network. Nowadays the same basic idea is widely promoted in the form of cloud computing by most major computer vendors. Grid computing technologies have been used for many years in scientific computing. In Finland, the original M-grid project provided a hybrid form of Grid computing by using distributed computer cluster networks both locally and as a Grid. The Finnish Grid Infrastructure (FGI) project builds on this success, and brings more resources to an even greater number of scientists. The FGI consortium procures, installs and maintains the systems that represent the latest technology at each university site. The FGI consortium represents, in particular, information sciences, material sciences including chemistry and physics, biosciences and computational pharmacy, but the resources will also be available to researchers in all other scientific disciplines who need high-performance computing. The FGI consortium was formed by CSC and the nine participating universities: Aalto University, University of Helsinki, Lappeenranta University of Technology, Tampere University of Technology, University of Eastern Finland, University of Jyvaskyla, University of Oulu, University of Turku and Abo Akademi University. The consortium is led by Prof. Kai Nordlund from the University of Helsinki and Dr. Pekka Lehtovuori from CSC. CSC's responsibility is the procurement process and coordinating the operation of the infrastructure in the coming years. CSC will install grid middleware, authentication services, support and follow the infrastructure usage. The systems should be available for researchers in early 2012. The local needs of the FGI-consortium vary and so the installations at each institute are slightly different and, correspondingly, the systems consist of different kind of servers with different configurations. The primary computing capacity will consist of HP Proliant SL 390 G7 1U servers installed in S6500 Scale-out chassis with modest or large amounts of memory. Very large memory needs of up to 1 TB are catered for by HP Proliant DL 580 G7 servers. General purpose graphics processing (GPGPU) computing capacity is provided via NVIDIA cards installed in HP ProLiant SL390s G7 2U servers which fit in the same S6500 chassis as the compute nodes. The total memory of the systems adds up to 22 TB. Solutions for storage needs will be taken care of by node local disks and HP ProLiant DL360 G7 servers with StorageWorks D2000 disk shelves. The total disk capacity is almost one Peta Byte (1000 TB). The 1 TB memory per server has a special purpose: the entire human genome can be fit into and processed in a computer with a memory of this size. This avoids slow hard disk operations and therefore speeds up analysis significantly, which is crucial in the rapidly growing field of bioinformatics. The rapid advances in the price-to-quality ratio for computer capacity now make it possible to do such kind of modeling and data mining work with off-the-shelf computers at a relatively modest price. The aggregated theoretical peak capacity of the systems will be approximately 154 TFlop/s of which 51 TFlop/s is provided by conventional CPU and 103 TFlop/s is provided by General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU). One TFlop/s means 1012 (Tera) floating point operations (Flop) per second. The computational nodes at each site will be connected together with a fast interconnect (Infiniband) which enables efficient parallel usage. The different sites are connected via the FUNET network administered by CSC. The FGI will be connected to the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), where it represents the Finnish National Grid Infrastructure. About CSC CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd. is a non-profit limited company administered by the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. Having core competences in modeling, computing and information services, CSC provides versatile IT services, support and resources for academia, research institutes, and companies. The FUNET communication links provide research workers with Finland's widest selection of scientific software and databases and Finland's most powerful supercomputing environment. More information is available at www.csc.fi. About HP HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world's largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure at the convergence of the cloud and connectivity, creating seamless, secure, context-aware experiences for a connected world. More information about HP is available at www.hp.com and www.hp.fi. Contact details University of Helsinki, Kai Nordlund, Professor, 09 1915 0007, kai.nordlund (at) helsinki.fi CSC, Pekka Lehtovuori, Development manager, 050 381 9723, Pekka.lehtovuori (at) csc.fi HP, Taina Kaitala, Media Relations Manager, 050 372 3406, taina.kaitala (at) hp.com [Editorial queries for this story should be sent to [email protected]] ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) (c) 2011 Electronic News Publishing - [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]