The Czech Hydrometeorological Institute (CHMI) has worked with the Japanese multinational information technology and electronics company NEC Corporation to implement a new supercomputer. The NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA supercomputer, a newly deployed HPC solution, will be used for high-resolution regional climate modeling.
The supercomputer was delivered by NEC Deutschland. It will be used to simulate a future climate, and how its changes will manifest themselves. For example, it will help to predict the future frequency and intensity of draught periods, and the change of extremity of weather phenomena like flash floods and strong winds. The ultimate goal is to help prepare for adaptation measures, mitigating the impacts of the changing climate.
“We are very happy to bring the new NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA into operation. For us, NEC’s vector technology that SX-Aurora TSUBASA provides represents a highly attractive alternative to competing HPC technologies, especially since we do not need to rewrite the majority of our productive codes. Another great advantage is the excellent ratio between the applicative performance gain factor and power consumption,” said Dr Radmila Brozkova, head of the CHMI Numerical Weather Prediction department.
At its heart the supercomputer has 48 vector hosts containing 384 vector engine cards of type VE 20B in a directly liquid-cooled (DLC) environment, together with a fully non-blocking high-speed interconnect based on Mellanox HDR InfiniBand network technology, and a total of 18TB of HBM2 high-speed memory, and 24TB of DDR4 main memory. In addition, an HPC parallel storage solution on the basis of the NEC LxFS-z Storage Appliance with a usable capacity of more than 2PB was deployed.
NEC has realized a highly efficient DLC concept with cold water by combining leading-edge DLC and side cooler technology to avoid any leakage of waste heat into the computer room, which allows the complete system and the environment to operate without any additional air-conditioning in place.