The Krakow supercomputer is one of the most powerful in the world.

The Prometheus computer from AGH University of Science and Technology was ranked the 71th highest on the TOP500 list, the world's most powerful computer. It is the highest Polish position in the history of this ranking.

Faster thanks to expansion.

Prometheus from Cyfronet AGH's Academic Computing Centre was placed on the list for the second time, far ahead of other supercomputers in Poland and improving its position in July by eleven places. This was made possible by its expansion by another five cabinets, which increased Prometheus' output from 1.7 Pflops to almost 2.4 Pflops.

The AGH spokesman added that the list also included another AGH computer, Zeus, a long-time leader among Polish computing machines. The list also includes Polish computers from the Information Centre of the Tri-City Academic Computer Network, Wrocław Supercomputing Centre and the National Centre for Nuclear Research in Świerk.

Prometheus is the fastest supercomputer in Polish history. It was launched in April 2015 and consists of over 2.2 thousand servers of the HP Apollo 8000 platform, connected with the superfast InfiniBand network of 56 Gbit/s throughput.

The supercomputer has more than 53,000 computing cores (Intel Haswell's energy-efficient and high-performance processors) and 279 TB of DDR4 memory, and two file systems with a total capacity of 10 PB and an immense access speed of 180 GB/s are included with Prometheus. Prometheus is also equipped with 144 Nvidia Tesla cards.

It works like 50,000 PCs.

To illustrate Prometheus' speed, the power of more than 50,000 top-of-the-range PCs in the most powerful configuration, additionally connected to super-fast networks and managed by special software, would have to be used to match its performance.

Thanks to innovative direct liquid cooling technology, Prometheus is one of the most energy-efficient computers. Its energy efficiency equals that of the world's largest data centres, such as Google and Facebook. In addition, liquid cooling allows for extremely high installation densities, so that the calculation part weighing over 30 tons only takes up 18 square meters and fits in only 20 cabinets," said the director. He added that in order to achieve the same parameters, Prometheus' predecessor Zeus would have to occupy as many as 160 cabinets.

Used not only for scientific research.

The AGH University of Science and Technology is conducting research on supercomputers, including: prediction of the spatial structure of proteins, nanostructures of modern semiconductors, calculations related to the analysis of galaxy variability in a wide range of electromagnetic spectrum radiation, and simulation of the complexity of financial markets.

Kraków's supercomputers also benefit from international research projects involving Polish scientists. Thanks to the very fast internet network, Prometheus and Zeus are used to analyse scientific data from experiments. Thanks to specialized software, supercomputers analyze large data sets according to set criteria and prepare advanced visualizations.

In 2014 alone, nearly 8 million tasks were completed on Zeus, with a total calculation time of almost 13,000 years.

Sours: google.com
https://www.agh.edu.pl