NERSC launches Edison supercomputer with 2.4 petaflops performance



    The name of the famous scientist and inventor, Edison, is now widely known. They did a miniature computer the size of an SD card, now here’s a supercomputer the size of a couple of rooms. They also named him in honor of Edison. The working name is Cray XC30. Officially, this supercomputer will be launched on February 5, and created by specialists from the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center.

    According to representatives of the project team, about 5 thousand people from around the world will work with this supercomputer. Among those who will be allowed access to the system’s resources are biologists, climatologists, materials scientists, physicists, and other specialists. Accordingly, the supercomputer will help clarify the history of the emergence of the Universe, study the genotype of living beings, help create new materials with desired properties and characteristics.

    The developers have optimized this system for demanding computing, in fact, for this Cray XC30 was created.

    The performance of a 2.4 petaflops system automatically puts the supercomputer in the top ten most powerful systems around the world. Edison is equipped with 322 terabytes of RAM, 124608 processor cores, 7.56 petabytes of internal memory. In addition, the system boasts a memory bandwidth of 462 TB / s.

    It is worth noting that this device is backward compatible with the previous model, Cray XE6 (this system was also created by NERSC). In other words, in order to make their software work on the new supercomputer, scientists need to make minimal changes to the Cray XE6 software. So almost immediately after the launch of the system, scientists will be able to access the resources of the new supercomputer.

    By the way, the original cooling system is used here - water. The cooling of the supercomputer modules will occur thanks to the chilled water entering through special pipelines. Already heated water is cooled outside, in special cooling towers.

    Via nersc

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