Difference between revisions of "QUonG initiative"

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Revision as of 15:27, 21 June 2011

The QUonG Initiative

Elemento QUonG.png
QUonG rack.png

QUonG is an Logo-infn.pngINFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) initiative targeted to develop a High Performance Computing system dedicated (but not limited) to Lattice QCD computations.

QUonG is a massively parallel computing platform built up from commodity multi-core processors coupled with latest generation GPUs; its communication mesh - being tailored to the characteristics of LQCD algorithms - is a point-to-point, high performance, low latency network where the computing nodes are topologically arranged as vertexes of a 3 dimensional torus.

The network is built upon the APEnet+ project.

Prototype system

The first prototype of the QUonG parallel system is expected to be delivered before the end of 2011. The chosen ratio for this first deliverable is one (multi-core) host for two GPU's.

As a consequence, the QUonG elementary mechanical assembly is a 3U "sandwich" made of two Intel-based servers plus a NVIDIA S2050 multiple GPU system equipped with the APEnet+ network board.

The assembly collects two QUonG elementary computing units, each made of one server hosting the interface board to control 2 (out of 4) GPU's inside the S2050 and one APEnet+ board. In this way, a QUonG elementary computing unit is topologically equivalent to two vertexes of the APEnet+ 3-dim mesh.

Envisioned upcoming system

Building from the configuration of the first QUonG prototype equipped with current NVIDIA Tesla GPU's with Fermi architecture, we envision a final shape for a deployed QUonG system as an assembly of fully populated standard 42U height QUonG racks, each one capable of 60 TFlops/rack in single precision (30 TFlops/rack in double precision) of peak performance, at a cost of 5kEuro/TFlops and for an estimated power consumption of 25 kW/rack.

A typical QUonG PFlops scale installation, composed of 16 QUonG racks interconnected via APEnet+ 3-dim torus network, will be characterized by an estimated power consumption of the order of 400 kW and a cost ratio of the order of 5 kEuro/TFlops.