Annual Report 2011 - CSCS

Welcome from the Director
Welcome to this review of CSCS in 2011!
Thomas Schulthess, Director of CSCS.
I have the pleasure of introducing this review of last year’s most
important activities and accomplishments at CSCS.
The silent but important highlight of the year 2011 was certainly
the completion of the new building in Lugano. Construction
started in early summer 2010, and was essentially complete
by the end of 2011, leaving mainly the testing and acceptance
of the complex infrastructure for 2012. On-time execution
of this complex project was possible due to incredible contributions
and teamwork by many participants: the real estate
department and the planners at ETH; the experts from the
construction planning team, and all the contributors working
for the construction company Implenia as well as numerous
subcontracting companies; CSCS staff, in particular Ladina Gilly;
the Canton of Ticino and the municipality of Lugano. Most
importantly the people of Lugano who were supportive of the
project despite the disruption to their lives deserve our appreciation
– after all the pipes for the lake water cooling had to be
laid across the city from the lake to our new location next to
the stadium in Cornaredo.
The second large project of the HPCN initiative besides the new
building is the Swiss Platform for High-Performance and High-
Productivity Computing (HP2C), which underwent a mid-term
review in 2011. The fact that 80 scientists and developers came
to this two-day review the week before Christmas is a testimony
to the commitment of the community of application developers.
A panel of international reviewers recognized the high quality
and pioneering contributions of the platform and its thirteen
projects. A proposal for a future analogous project, to succeed
HP2C, in 2013, will certainly receive a boost from this review.
Following the July 2011 meeting of ETH Board, the supercomputing
systems of the HPCN initiative are now officially considered
a scientific user lab with allocations carried out under
a competitive peer-reviewed process. These systems are now
formally a research infrastructure that will receive support
as long as it is deemed important for Swiss science. This is a
key milestone for simulation-based science in Switzerland, as
it can now rely on a sustained infrastructure, as is common in
experiment-driven branches of science, rather than having to
reinvent itself every few years when the procurement of a new
supercomputer has to be justified.
Besides the upgrade of our flagship system Monte Rosa, now
equipped with about three thousand sixteen-core processors
and Cray’s new Gemini interconnect, CSCS introduced several
new architectures in 2011. A next-generation Cray XMT system
particularly well suited for graph based data analysis, as well as
an SGI Ultraviolet system form the processing part of the new
data analysis and storage facility EUREKA. The first two Cray
XK6 cabinets, equipped with 176 hybrid nodes consisting of
multi-core CPUs from AMD and Graphics Processing Units
(GPU) from NVIDIA, were introduced in October 2011. Experience
with the Cray XK6 and also a second hybrid-node based
IBM iDataPlex cluster demonstrate that GPU-based systems
could cause a real disruption within the supercomputing market.
The architecture has to be seriously considered in future
system developments at CSCS.
I would like to thank all CSCS staff, ETH Zurich, the university
of Lugano, as well as our partners and all persons and organizations
that supported us in completing another successful year
in 2011. We are very much looking forward to 2012, when we
will move into the new building in Lugano and begin construction
of the next generation of supercomputers at CSCS.
Prof. Thomas Schulthess
Director CSCS