FinisTerrae
Encyclopedia
Finisterrae was the 100th supercomputer in Top500
ranking in November 2007. Running at 12.97 Teraflops, it would rank at position 258 on the list as of June 2008. It is also the third most powerful supercomputer in Spain
(after MareNostrum
and Magerit
). It is located in Galicia.
This project is promoted by the Xunta de Galicia
(regional government of Galicia) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). It was founded in the year 1993 to serve as a platform to foster scientific innovation and invest in Research and Development.
It is estimated that the base project will be completed in 2010. It is expected to reach the TOP10 of the most powerful supercomputers in the world when it reaches full capacity. The supercomputer is physically hosted at CESGA
.
One of the special characteristic about this supercomputer is the ratio between cores and RAM
. This was one reason why it received the denomination of "singular technical and scientific installation" from the Spanish government, a denomination given to some installations which have some value that makes them singular in some way. Some of those installations include the Canary Island grand telescope, or the Alba synchrotron.
Even if this is the third fastest supercomputer in Spain, some projects that require special amounts of memory cannot be held by the first or second supercomputer, and therefore must be executed on the Finisterrae.
FinisTerrae supercomputer, located in CESGA
is an integrated system by shared-memory nodes with and SMP NUMA architecture.
FinisTerrae is composed of
144 computational nodes:
HP Integrity
rx7640 nodes with 16 Itanium Montvale cores and 128 GB memory each one. Integrity Superdome node, with 128 Itanium Montvale cores and 1024 GB memory. Integrity Superdome node, with 128 Itanium 2 cores and 384 GB memory.
An hierarchic storing system with:
. The main projects hold by the supercomputer are divided into four fields:
TOP500
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year...
ranking in November 2007. Running at 12.97 Teraflops, it would rank at position 258 on the list as of June 2008. It is also the third most powerful supercomputer in Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
(after MareNostrum
MareNostrum
MareNostrum is a supercomputer in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the second most powerful in Spain. It was presented by IBM and María Jesús San Segundo, the Spanish Minister of Education and Science...
and Magerit
Magerit
Magerit is the name of the one of the most powerful supercomputers of Spain. It also reached the second best Spanish position in the TOP500 list of supercomputers.This computer is installed in CeSViMa, a research center of the Technical University of Madrid....
). It is located in Galicia.
This project is promoted by the Xunta de Galicia
Xunta de Galicia
The Xunta de Galicia is the collective decision-making body of the government of the autonomous community of Galicia, composed of the President, the Vice-President and the specialized ministers ....
(regional government of Galicia) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). It was founded in the year 1993 to serve as a platform to foster scientific innovation and invest in Research and Development.
It is estimated that the base project will be completed in 2010. It is expected to reach the TOP10 of the most powerful supercomputers in the world when it reaches full capacity. The supercomputer is physically hosted at CESGA
CESGA
CESGA stands for "Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia" . It is a high performance computing center in Galicia ....
.
Overview
The main Finisterrae characteristics are depicted on the following table:| Name | Finisterrae |
| Place | CESGA CESGA CESGA stands for "Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia" . It is a high performance computing center in Galicia .... |
| Country | Spain Spain Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula... |
| Year | 2007 |
| OS | Linux |
| Architecture | Itanium 2 64 64-bit 64-bit is a word size that defines certain classes of computer architecture, buses, memory and CPUs, and by extension the software that runs on them. 64-bit CPUs have existed in supercomputers since the 1970s and in RISC-based workstations and servers since the early 1990s... (Intel) |
| Processors | 2400 |
| Memory | 19584 GB Gigabyte The gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage. The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units , therefore 1 gigabyte is... |
| Power | 12970 GFLOPS FLOPS In computing, FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second... |
| Top500 Ranking | 100 |
| Web | www.cesga.es |
One of the special characteristic about this supercomputer is the ratio between cores and RAM
Ram
-Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...
. This was one reason why it received the denomination of "singular technical and scientific installation" from the Spanish government, a denomination given to some installations which have some value that makes them singular in some way. Some of those installations include the Canary Island grand telescope, or the Alba synchrotron.
Even if this is the third fastest supercomputer in Spain, some projects that require special amounts of memory cannot be held by the first or second supercomputer, and therefore must be executed on the Finisterrae.
Architecture
CESGA
CESGA stands for "Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia" . It is a high performance computing center in Galicia ....
is an integrated system by shared-memory nodes with and SMP NUMA architecture.
FinisTerrae is composed of
144 computational nodes:
HP Integrity
HP Integrity
HP Integrity is series of Hewlett-Packard server computers produced by Hewlett-Packard since 2003, based on the Itanium processor architecture...
rx7640 nodes with 16 Itanium Montvale cores and 128 GB memory each one. Integrity Superdome node, with 128 Itanium Montvale cores and 1024 GB memory. Integrity Superdome node, with 128 Itanium 2 cores and 384 GB memory.
An hierarchic storing system with:
- 22 nodes for storing management with 96 processing cores.
- The storage is connected to 72 cabins connected to 864 SATASataSata is a traditional dish from the Malaysian state of Terengganu, consisting of spiced fish meat wrapped in banana leaves and cooked on a grill.It is a type of Malaysian fish cake, or otak-otak...
disks, managed by LustreLustre (file system)Lustre is a massively parallel distributed file system, generally used for large scale cluster computing. The name Lustre is a portmanteau word derived from Linux and cluster...
. Backups are stored on tapes which provide 2.200.000 GB.
- An interconnecting network between Infiniband 4x DDR at 20 Gbit/s nodes, providing 16 Gbit/s of effective bandwidth.
- An external management Gigabit Ethernet network.
- The nodes user SUSESUSE Linux distributionsSUSE Linux is a computer operating system. It is built on top of the open source Linux kernel and is distributed with system and application software from other open source projects. SUSE Linux is of German origin and mainly developed in Europe. The first version appeared in early 1994, making...
Linux enterprise server as the Operating System. This operating system helped saving an important amount of money when comparing to other non-free options.
- FinisTerrae includes open software and standard like: LinuxLinuxLinux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
, LustreLustre (file system)Lustre is a massively parallel distributed file system, generally used for large scale cluster computing. The name Lustre is a portmanteau word derived from Linux and cluster...
, Grid Engine and GlobusGlobus ToolkitThe Globus Toolkit, currently at version 5, is an open source toolkit for building computing grids developed and provided by the Globus Alliance.-Standards implementation:The Globus Toolkit is an implementation of the following standards:...
.
- System also has next compilators, libraries and development tools: Intel C/C y FortranFortranFortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
, Intel MKL, Vtune, HP-MPI y HP UPC.
Projects
As main purpose, the aim of the supercomputer is research. The supercomputer is mainly used by the three universities located in Galicia, (Universidade da Coruña, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela and Universidade de Vigo), as well as other research organizations like CSICCSIC
The Spanish National Research Council is the largest public institution dedicated to research in Spain and the third largest in Europe...
. The main projects hold by the supercomputer are divided into four fields:
- Life sciences.
- Nanotechnology.
- Sea sciences.
- Renewable energies.
Curiosities
- The machines need 140 square meters of space.
- It weights around 33,5 tons.
- The amount of cables used to interconnect the nodes is around 85 km, the distance between the supercomputer location (Santiago) and Finisterre.