HPCwire
 The global publication of record for High Performance Computing / April 2, 2004: Vol. 13, No. 13

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Cluster Computing:

U OF WUPPERTAL SELECTS PARASTATION FOR LINUX CLUSTER

ParTec AG announced that the University of Wuppertal, Germany, has chosen Parastation 4 as a cluster middleware package for it's new LINUX compute cluster "ALICEnext". Parastation has been successfully in use for over three years on the current 128 node "ALICE" cluster. It's superior performance and reliability features made it the software of choice for the successor system as well. The University selected the German system integrator CADAC GmbH to deliver this new supercomputer consisting of 500 CPUs AMD Dual Opteron (1,8 GHz, 2 GB main memory/board)

When ALICE was built in 2000, ParTec AG installed Parastation Version 2.0. The upgrade to Version 3.0 in the following year resulted in a performance improvement of 10%. Due to this increase, the University of Wuppertal was then able to keep the system in the TOP500 list.

ALICEnext will become the most powerful LINUX cluster in Germany. The system will be used for large scale scientific calculations as well as for the education of students in parallel computing and grid computing. The contributing departments are Theoretical Elementary Particle Physics (Prof. Fodor), Astro-Particle Physics (Prof. Kampert), Experimental Particle Physics (Prof. Maettig) and Applied Computer Science (Prof. Frommer).

The cluster is expected to be operational in early summer 2004. One of the first activities will be the execution of the Linpack benchmark to determine it's position in the TOP500 list. Also because of Parastation, a prominent placement is expected.


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Professor Andreas Frommer, Managing Director of the "Institute for Applied Computer Science" at the University of Wuppertal, explained: " Parastation is an essential part of the ALICEnext network. By using the advanced Parastation protocol, we achieve substantial runtime reductions for our communication- intensive applications. ALICEnext constitutes a new era of the successful cooperation between the University and ParTec AG in the deployment of cluster supercomputers."

Hugo R. Falter, CEO ParTec AG, added: "The decision to deploy Parastation on the largest German LINUX cluster demonstrates the excellent relationship with the University of Wuppertal built up in many years of successful cooperation and emphasizes the leading role of Parastation as a cluster middleware solution."

Parastation 4 enhances the communication performance between cluster nodes by means of an optimized Ethernet protocol bypassing the TCP/IP stack. It also offers sophisticated features for runtime management of parallel jobs, resulting in more usable application cycles over the lifetime of the cluster.

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