QUonG initiative

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The QUonG Proposal

The QUonG proposal is an initiative by Logo-infn.png INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) targeted at nurturing a hardware-software ecosystem centering on the subject of Lattice QCD.

Leveraging on the acquired know-how of the APE group in the co-development of High Performance Computing systems dedicated (but not limited) to LQCD, QUonG aims at providing the scientific community a comprehensive platform for the development of LQCD multi-node parallel applications.

The QUonG hardware

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.

Elemento QUonG.png

The QUonG Prototype

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 S2050/70/90 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 S2050/70/90 and one APEnet+ board. In this way, a QUonG elementary computing unit is topologically equivalent to two vertexes of the APEnet+ 3-dim mesh.


The envisioned QUonG Rack

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.

QUonG rack.png