Press release: Beskow welcomes a sister system, Tegner, at the end of March!

PDC is excited to announce that the new pre- and post-processing system we have all been waiting for will be arriving at the end of March and should be available to users before the summer. For the last few months since the arrival of our new supercomputer Beskow, which is currently the fastest academic supercomputer in Scandinavia, PDC has been working to find a suitable pre- and post-processing system for Beskow. The pre- and post-processing system is needed to prepare the data that is used in the large simulations that run on Beskow (for example, preparing a grid of points to represent the surface of an aeroplane wing), and to analyse the data the results from the calculations performed on Beskow (for example, creating an image with different colours to indicate the different levels of air resistance around the wing as the plane flies after Beskow has calculated the air resistance values for all the points in the grid).

The good news is that PDC/KTH has just signed a contract with Data Access Sweden (a company that specialises in providing high performance computing and mission critical systems) and its distribution partner Nextron to provide a pre- and post-processing system for Beskow. The system will be called Tegner in honour of Alice Tegnér who wrote many Swedish songs for children. (We leave out the accent in the computer name for practical reasons.) In the first half of last century Alice Tegnér collaborated with Elsa Beskow to create many charming song books for children, with Alice composing the music and Elsa illustrating the books. Both Alice and Elsa lived in Djursholm in Stockholm, and now, almost a century later, the computer systems Tegner and Beskow will be cooperating in a similar manner a little farther south at PDC in Norra Djurgården.

The system Tegner will consist of 67 Intel SuperMicro nodes with 9 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and 40 terabytes of main memory with a maximum processing speed of about 100 teraflops. The system will cost ten million Swedish crowns over four years, with financing coming from SNIC, KTH and other partners.