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The newest Cray XT5 computer at CSCS, named “Monte Rosa”, today holds the 21 st position in the prestigious Top500 list,
which ranks the 500 fastest supercomputers worldwide. In Europe Monte Rosa ranks 4 th . There is a good reason for the
brilliant performance: the installation of the Cray XT5 is the first step in the implementation of the national strategy for
high-performance computing and networking (HPCN) proposed in 2007 by a group of experts, and launched in 2009 by the
Swiss Federal Council.
Supercomputers are the fastest and most powerful computers
available. They are increasingly used in the fast-growing field of
computational sciences. They are made up of tens or hundreds
of thousands of single processors, which operate in parallel as a single
big machine thanks to a sophisticated, high-speed communication
network. Because of their structure, they are called massively parallel
computers. The performance of such machines is expressed by the
number of floating point operations per second (flops) they are able to
perform. Monte Rosa’s computing speed is ten thousand times faster
than that of a latest-generation PC. It is however, only one tenth as
fast as that of the winner of the latest Top500 contest, the Cray XT5
“Jaguar” of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
CSCS installed its first massively parallel supercomputer only a few
years ago, in 2005. Il was a Cray XT3 machine, the first of this kind
in Europe, and a wise investment that proved to be decisive for the
future strategy of the Centre. A Cray XT4 used by the national
weather forecasting service MeteoSwiss, and the newly installed Cray
XT5 continue this successful line. Monte Rosa is made up of 20 cabinets
containing around fifteen thousand processors linked by means of a
newly designed high-speed network. A novel, highly efficient watercooling
system has replaced the air-cooling used in former models.
Supercomputers play a key role in science today as they enable the
researchers using numerical simulation techniques to tackle arduous
problems and to study complex systems, which would otherwise not
be accessible to scientific analysis. This methodology is recognized as
Swiss Label Ticino 2010
C O M PA N Y P RO F I L E
New developments at CSCS,
the national supercomputing centre
the third pillar of scientific research alongside theory and experiment.
Supercomputing offers extraordinary opportunities: it allows scientists
to represent and thus to study the movement of single atoms in a
molecule, the diffusion of drugs or other chemical substances through
biological membranes, the adhesion and proliferation of bacteria in
tissues, the penetration of a virus into a cell, which is the initial phase
of an infection, and many more phenomena in areas such as physics,
chemistry, climate and astronomy which cannot be explored by means
of experiments. In the fields of engineering, medicine, technology and
many more, simulation is increasingly substituting experiments and
there is even hope that supercomputing may eventually reduce the
need for animal experimentation in the pharmaceutical industry.
In order to implement the Swiss national strategy for highperformance
computing, a supercomputer of the petaflops class is to
be installed at CSCS in 2012. This system will be housed in a new
CSCS building in Lugano, which will also provide the space and the
power for future machines. The strategy also intends to strengthen the
national network between universities and boost education in the field
of computational sciences. The faculty of informatics of the University
of Lugano (USI), recognized for its excellence, has made a first important
step in this direction, together with CSCS, by laying the basis for a
centre of competence that will also include ETH Zurich. CSCS also
aims at working closely with the other Swiss universities and industry
to develop the supercomputing architectures of the future. Another
ambitious objective is to eventually create a Swiss supercomputing
ecosystem by coordinating the use of local resources at the universities
and of national resources at CSCS in order to
ensure optimal accessibility in accordance with the
type of applications and best exploit the enormous
opportunities offered by computational sciences.
Marco Baggiolini, former acting director of CSCS
Swiss National Supercomputing Centre
Galleria 2, Via Cantonale
CH-6928 Manno (Switzerland)
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