Presenting Dardel for Businesses

Dardel is not just used for academic research. Various companies, such as Scania, Sweco, Faurecia Creo, Ishaq Fluid Mechanics, Tyréns, Polarium and Phoenix BioPower, collaborate with KTH and use PDC’s resources for aspects of their research programmes. Earlier this year, Arash Alizad Banaei (who is an application expert at PDC) and Gert Svensson (Deputy Director of PDC) provided business users with an overview of the new Dardel system. Personnel from about ten companies attended the presentation, which was based on a similar event for Scania staff that was held late last year.

It was explained that Dardel will have two partitions: the first is primarily based on CPUs and the second, which has been installed late this year, features GPUs. The total estimated HPL performance of the new GPU partition with 56 AMD Instinct nodes, each node with 4 AMD MI250X GPUs, was mentioned as an impressive 8.2 PLFOPS. In addition, on the CPU nodes, the number of cores has been increased to 128. Although the total memory bandwidth per node has almost doubled from that of PDC’s previous system, Beskow, the memory bandwidth per core is considerably less. It was highlighted that this can necessitate changes to codes with high memory bandwidth in order to utilise the new system efficiently.

The companies were also informed about other changes in the system environment, including

• the option to login using key pairs instead of Kerberos,
• what shared nodes are and how they work,
• how the new storage system is organised,
• that nodes are not using the previous AFS storage system anymore, and
• details about the new module system,

and participants were shown how to run applications on Dardel.

The presentation concluded with an overview of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and mechanical applications that are available on Dardel, since most of the businesses using Dardel are actively doing research in these areas. If your company is interested in using the PDC’s high-performance facilities, including the second (accelerated) partition of Dardel, please contact business-unit@pdc.kth.se .