Press release: Beskow extension will make peak performance exceed 2 petaFLOPS

The well-known Swedish automotive company, Scania, is increasing its level of collaboration with the PDC Centre for High Performance Computing especially in the area of computational fluid dynamics. Thanks to this, PDC’s Cray XC40 system Beskow (which will continue to be the fastest academic supercomputing system in Scandinavia) will be extended with two additional compute cabinets at the end of August.

This upgrade will add an extra 384 compute nodes to Beskow. Each of the new compute nodes will consist of two Intel Broadwell 2.1 GHz processors (with 18 cores each) and each node will have 128 GB of memory. The new nodes will be slightly more powerful than Beskow’s current nodes, which all consist of two Intel Haswell 2.3 GHz processors (with 16 cores each) and which have 64GB of memory per node. As with the rest of the Beskow system, the new nodes will be connected via the Cray Aries high-speed network. The new nodes will add 13,824 cores to Beskow’s 53,632 current cores to give a total of 67,456 cores in 11 compute cabinets, and will increase Beskow’s theoretical peak performance from 1973 TFLOPS to 2438 TFLOPS.

With the additional nodes and Beskow’s increased theoretical peak performance of nearly 2.5 petaFLOPS, Beskow will continue to be a prime infrastructure for academic and industrial computational research in Sweden. As before, the system will be available to Swedish academia via SNIC. For information on how to gain access to Beskow visit the PDC Support pages  or contact PDC Support ( support@pdc.kth.se ).