08 Jun Shaheen II: A New Supercomputer

[vc_text_separator title='' title_align='separator_align_left' border='no' border_color='' background_color='' text_color=''] I had the privilege to attend a workshop about our new high-performance supercomputer Shaheen-II at KAUST. In May 2015, KAUST acquired and installed a new Cray XC40 supercomputer: Shaheen II. This machine delivers 25 times the sustained computing capability of KAUST’s current system (Shaheen I, IBM BG/P). Shaheen II, with a theoretical peak performance of 7.2 PFLOP/s, is composed of 6,174 dual sockets compute nodes based on 16 cores Intel Haswell processors running at 2.3GHz representing a total of 197,568 cores. The processors are tightly integrated with a richly layered memory hierarchy and dragonfly interconnection network with a total storage space in the parallel file system of 17 PB. The homogenous design of Shaheen II Cray XC40 with only Haswell makes it suitable for most, if not all, of KAUST applications. The workshop was targeted to any potential Shaheen II users looking forward to port and run their codes in the new system. ...