NEC HPC Cluster Unlocks Universal Secrets

The Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam, Germany, has taken delivery of a high performance computer (HPC) cluster from NEC. The 200 servers and their 2,400 Intel Xeon processors can execute 25,500 billion operations every second.

Handling this astronomical number of operations befits the cluster’s main purpose, which is to simulate the gravitational wave effects produced when neutron stars collide and black holes decelerate.

Higher Speed Allows Greater Complexity

The massive forces that come into play in the outer reaches of the cosmos cannot be simulated in laboratories and so, based on Einstein’s formulae, the effects of the phenomena are calculated within large matrix arrays within the inner space environment of the cluster. As the results are calculated, the effects and spread of the gravitational forces are displayed graphically.

Under the leadership of Professor Luciano Rezolla, the chief scientist for the’s Numerical Relativity Group Albert Einstein Institute, this research will now be able to proceed two or three times faster than before. The Linux-based HPC simulations run for several days or even weeks within the 4.8 terabytes of memory accessed by the Intel Xeon X5650 processors so the time savings over the previous clusters will enable more detailed operations to be included in each simulation.

“By studying the behaviour of neutron stars and black holes for a longer period of time in our ‘virtual laboratory’ we expect to find new phenomena”, said Rezzolla. “Moreover, we will be able to produce even more precise predictions for the characteristic forms of gravitational wave signals, because we can model the motion of these in-spiralling neutron stars and black holes for a longer period of time.”

The computer was inaugurated by Professor Sabine Kunst, the minister of science for the State of Brandenburg, at the German High Performance Computing in the new Decade symposium at the Institute. The cluster will be named Datura, after the common thornapple, Datura stramonium – a wasteland weed with poisonous leaves and fruits that can have hallucinogenic effects. It joins two older clusters called Peyote and Damiana.

Unlike NEC’s SX-series of vector computers, Datura follows the LX-series format which uses standard components and open source software.