Argonne National Laboratory will soon have the data analytics and visualization capability to complement its distinction as the fastest computer in the world for open science. Argonne awarded GraphStream, Inc. a contract that will help to make data analytics and visualization at this scale possible through the world’s largest installation of NVIDIA Quadro® Plex S4 external graphics processing units (GPU). This new supercomputer installation, nicknamed Eureka, will allow researchers to explore and visualize the data they produce with Intrepid. The powerful installation will offer 104 dual quad core servers with 208 Quadro FX5600 GPUs in the S4s.
Using the NVIDIA Quadro Plex S4 visual computing system as the base graphics building block, Eureka will deliver a quantum leap in visual compute density, enabling breakthrough levels of productivity and capability in visualization and data analysis,
said Craig Dunwoody, CEO of GraphStream. The base server building block is the SuperMicro 6015-UR. The S4 attaches to a server on either side of it, forming a “sandwich.” To the servers, it appears as if they have two Quadro FX5600 graphics cards inside of them. While there are small system disks in the server, all of the data comes from the large storage system over the network.
Economical, low-latency modular switches represent the heart of the data-management system. The nine-switch complex supports up to 2,048 connections, each of which simultaneously exchanges data at roughly 1 billion bytes per second. The storage system offers a bank of more than 10,000 disk drives that will send and receive data from the Blue Gene/P’s more than 100,000 processors. Altogether, this system can deliver nearly 80 billion bytes per second to and from the disk—the equivalent of transferring the content of 100 full CDs every second.
Read full press release here.