The National Research and Technology Network (NRTN) is a pioneer in the field of supercomputing infrastructures, with the creation of the first national high-performance computing system .
The procurement and installation of the new system was undertaken by COSMOS Business Systems in collaboration with IBM, following an open international tender conducted by the Hellenic National Economic and Social Fund.
The new infrastructure is expected to play an important role in the development and promotion of scientific research in the country and in Southeastern Europe.
The system is based on NeXtScale , will incorporate the latest generation of Intel Xeon E5 v2 with Ivy Bridge technology, and will offer computing power reaching 180TFlops (trillion floating-point operations per second).
Featuring 426 computing nodes, it will offer a total of over 8,500 CPU cores interconnected in an FDR Infiniband network, an interconnection technology that offers very low latency and high bandwidth.
In addition, it will offer high-performance storage, approximately 1 Petabyte (four million bytes) in size, based on the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS).
The system will feature software for application development such as compilers, scientific libraries, and popular scientific application.
The new infrastructure will be integrated into the European supercomputer ecosystem, aspiring to be included in the 500 most powerful computers in the world, and to strengthen Greece's participation in the pan-European PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) infrastructure.
Computational Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Biomedicine, Meteorology, Seismology, Computer Engineering and Materials Sciencesare indicative scientific specialties that rely to a large extent on the utilization of modern supercomputing infrastructures.
The completion of the system installation and the start of its production operation are expected at the end of 2014.
Source: e-pcmag.gr
