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Beskow

Beskow was PDC's flagship system from 2015 to 2020. It was a CRAY XC40 and was one of the fastest academic supercomputing systems in Scandinavia while in operation.

Beskow, PDC's CRAY XC40 supercomputer

Beskow was a Cray XC40 system based on Intel Haswell and Broadwell processors and Cray Aries interconnect technology. The final version of the Beskow system at PDC had a total of 11 racks in two rows with a theoretical peak performance of 2.43 petaflops. The system was named after the famous Swedish author and illustrator Elsa Beskow , who produced many delightful children's books.

Beskow was designed for running large parallel jobs and was ranked in 33rd position in the November 2014 Top 500 list .

The system went into full production and was available for SNIC allocations from January 2015. Beskow was then upgraded from 9 to 11 racks in September 2017. The intended lifetime of the system was initially for 5 years (until the 31st of December 2019), although that was extended so the system would be available till at least the end of 2020.

System

  • 11 cabinets = 515 blades = 2,060 compute nodes
  • 2 x Intel CPUs per node:
    9 of the cabinets have Xeon E5-2698v3 Haswell 2.3 GHz CPUs (16 cores per CPU)
    2 of the cabinets have Xeon E5-2695v4 Broadwell 2.1 GHz CPUs (18 cores per CPU)
  • 67,456 cores in total
  • High speed network Cray Aries (Dragonfly topology)

Performance

  • Peak performance 2.438 PFLOPS
  • LINPACK performance 1.80 PFLOPS
  • 156.4 TB primary memory (64 GB per node on the Haswell nodes and 128 GB per node on the Broadwell nodes)
  • 5 PB Lustre file system

Usage

  • was available for academic research via SNIC and PRACE
  • was used for a variety of industrial research projects (including collaboration with Scania)