Initiative of the National Research and Technology Network
As announced, the procurement and installation of the new system was undertaken by COSMOS Business Systems S.A., in collaboration with IBM, following an open international tender conducted by the Hellenic National Research Fund S.A. The new infrastructure is expected to play an important role in the development and promotion of scientific research in our country and in Southeastern Europe in general.
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.
The national supercomputing infrastructure is being developed within the framework of the project "PRACE-GR - Development of a National Supercomputing Infrastructure and Provision of Related Services to the Greek Research and Academic Community", which is co-financed by the Operational Program "Attica" and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
The new national supercomputing system will contribute to strengthening the Greek scientific community, covering the needs of Greek users in multiple scientific specialties, improving their access to the pan-European PRACE infrastructure. Computational Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Biomedicine, Meteorology, Seismology, Computer Engineering and Materials Sciences are indicative of some scientific specialties that rely heavily on the utilization of modern supercomputing infrastructures.
The Greek system will be based on IBM's NeXtScale platform, will incorporate the latest generation of Intel Xeon E5 v2 processors with Ivy Bridge technology and will offer computing power reaching 180TFlops (trillions of floating-point operations per second).
With 426 compute nodes, it will offer a total of over 8,500 CPU cores interconnected over an FDR Infiniband network, an interconnect technology that offers very low latency and high bandwidth. It will also offer high-performance storage space of approximately 1 Petabyte (four million bytes).
As reported by the Athens News Agency, the system will also feature software for application development such as compilers, scientific libraries and popular scientific application "suites".
