Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Leftraru supercomputer is here, and you can try it!


Leftraru supercomputer is finally here and ready to produce groundbreaking science. Leftraru (also known as Lautaro) is a name coming from the Mapuche language meaning "swift hawk", which is a very appropriate name for a machine that will "fly" over oceans of data at high speed and literally survey the sky thanks to the astronomy models, data mining and visualization tools that will be deployed in the system in the coming months.

The machine is composed of 132 Hewlett-Packard computing nodes, each one with 2 10-core Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge processors (total of 2640 cores), combined with 6.25 terabytes of memory. In addition, it showcases 12 co-processors Intel Xeon Phi 5110p. The system has 274 terabytes of Lustre storage coupled with an Infiniband FDR network at 56Gbps.

Installed last June at the National Laboratory for High Performance Computing (NLHPC) in Santiago de Chile, the machine is set to be the most powerful supercomputer of Chile with a theoretical peak performance of 70 teraflops (70 trillion mathematical operations per second). 

NLHPC, in collaboration with the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) of the University of Chile (UChile), has launched a call for users to test the supercomputer. Among all applicants, four fortunate groups will be selected this Friday October 17th. The winners will be granted one month access to the supercomputer. They will be able to launch scientific simulations using up to 512 cores and 2 terabytes of storage during this period. The idea behind this great initiative is to showcase the scientific capabilities of the supercomputer.

NLHPC is a laboratory led by the CMM with UChile as sponsoring institution, in association with Universidad Católica del Norte (UCN), Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (UTFSM), Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC), Universidad de Santiago (USACH), Universidad de Talca(UTalca) and Universidad de la Frontera (UFRO) and REUNA.

3 comments:

  1. Do you have a link or instructions on how to apply for the testing?

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  2. Hi Franci,
    Thank you for your comment. Unfortunately it seems that the application period was closed on October 10th (according to this post: http://www.nlhpc.cl/leftraru-llego-y-queremos-invitarte-a-probarlo/). However, at the end of that article you can see that they provide an email address where you can ask for more information concerning access to the machine and future applications.

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  3. Thank you for your answer, Leo!
    It's a shame I can't use it, but news about a supercomputer in Latin America are still exciting. :)
    Good luck with the site!

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