Fermi is a 2.097

petaFLOPS Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

located at

CINECA Cineca is a non-profit consortium, made up of 69 Italian universities, 27 national public research centres, the Italian Ministry of Universities and Research (MUR) and the Italian Ministry of Education (MI), and was established in 1969 in Casal ...

History

FERMI is the main HPC computer in CINECA. It was acquired in June 2012 and entered into full production on August 8 the same year. Fermi is the Italian national tier-0 system for scientific research and is also part of the European HPC infrastructure (PRACE). Its procurement was sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research. In June 2012, Fermi reached the seventh position on the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

list of fastest supercomputers in the world. In the

Graph500 The Graph500 is a rating of supercomputer systems, focused on data-intensive loads. The project was announced on International Supercomputing Conference in June 2010. The first list was published at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in Nov ...

list of top supercomputers, Fermi reached the fifth position, testing at 2,567 gigaTEPS (

traversed edges per second The number of traversed edges per second (TEPS) that can be performed by a supercomputer cluster is a measure of both the communications capabilities and computational power of the machine. This is in contrast to the more standard metric of floati ...

Specifications

FERMI is a Blue Gene/Q system, the last generation of the IBM project for designing petascale supercomputers. It consists of 10 racks, two midplanes each, for a total of 10.240 compute nodes and 163.840 cores. * Each compute card (compute node) features a 1.6 GHz IBM processor chip with 16 A2 cores, 16 GB of RAM and the network connections. A total of 32 compute nodes are plugged into a node card. Then 16 node cards are deployed on one midplane which is combined with another midplane and two I/O drawers to fill a rack with a total of 32·32·16 = 16K cores for each rack. On the compute nodes runs a light Linux-like kernel (CNK − compute-node kernel). * Compute nodes are disk-less. I/O functionalities are provided by I/O nodes. * The nodes are accessed by ssh via the front-end nodes (or login nodes) at ''login.fermi.cineca.it''. The login nodes run a complete RedHat Linux distribution (6.2). Parallel applications have to be cross-compiled on the front-end nodes and can only be executed on the partition defined on the compute nodes. The CINECA system consists of 10 racks configured as follows: * 2 racks: 16 I/O nodes per rack (minimum job allocation of 64 nodes - 1024 cores). * 8 racks: 8 I/O nodes per rack (minimum job allocation of 128 nodes - 2048 cores).

References

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Articles about Fermi and its network

Il Sole 24 ore - in Italian

Datacenter Knowledge
Supercomputing in Europe IBM supercomputers

History

Specifications

See also

References

Articles about Fermi and its network