The Platform for Scientific Computing (Plattform für
Wissenschaftliches Rechnen) is an interdisciplinary effort of
professors from several disciplines and departments at
the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University to
foster research and application on High Performance Scientific
Computing (HPC). Main application areas are:
The existing HPC hardware has several components each suitable for different computational demands.
The main hardware ressources are, with a total of approx. 5,000 hardware threads,
approx. 200,000 GPU-cores, an accumulated main memory size of approx. 17.1 TB,
and an accumulated disk space of approx. 785 TB (gross):
a CPU compute cluster
with 50 nodes with 2x Intel Xeon processors (each 16-core + HT)
13 nodes with additional 1 or 4 accelerators (GPU) per node
Nodes are connected with 200 Gb/s Infiniband, 100 Gb/s Omni-Path and/or 1/10Gb-Ethernet.
A detailed description of the hardware configuration can be found here. Some pictures can be found here.
Usage
The front-end node is the only external visible access point and
can be accessed through wr0.wr.inf.h-brs.de
The nodes can be used with parallel programs that are either
based on a shared memory programming model (e.g. OpenMP) using up to 256-way
parallelism, based on a GPU programming model (CUDA, OpenCL, OpenACC) using up to
approx. 30,000 GPU cores in a system, or the cluster computer can be used
in a distributed memory model (e.g. MPI) using all cluster nodes with up to
approx. 5,000-way parallelism.
A detailled descriptions on how to use the cluster and information
on the software configuration can be found here .
Current Status
The current system status can be seen here. Pages get updated every minute.
Access is granted for research and educational projects supervised by
any of the participating professors. Additionally, other
projects are possible and explicitly encouraged.
Please feel free to ask questions. Contact person is Prof. Dr. Rudolf Berrendorf .
Funding
The Platform for Scientific Computing is/was supported by research grants:
German Ministry for Education and Research (research grant 13FH156IN6)
Ministry for Culture and Science of the state
Northrhine-Westfalia (research grant 13FH156IN6)
Ministry for Innovation, Science, Research, and Technology of the state
Northrhine-Westfalia (research grant FH-Basis 2012)
Ministry for Innovation, Science, Research, and Technology of the state
Northrhine-Westfalia (research grant GER08-16)
German Ministry for Education and Research (research grant 01AK605F)