Eurotech Supercomputer At CINECA Breaks World Record For Energy Efficiency

“Advanced computer simulations that enable scientists to discover new phenomena and test hypotheses require massive amounts of performance, which can consume a lot of power,” said Sanzio Bassini, Director of HPC Department at Cineca “Equipped with the ultra-efficient Aurora system and NVIDIA GPU accelerators, Eurora will give European researchers the computing muscle to study all types of physical and biological systems, while allowing us to keep data center power consumption and costs in check.”

The Eurora supercomputer is accelerated by NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU accelerators based on NVIDIA Kepler, the world’s fastest and most efficient high performance computing architecture. It provides the base for the commercial Eurotech Aurora Tigon, expanding the Eurotech Aurora supercomputer product line to include new energy-efficient, high-performance GPU-accelerated systems.

The combination of the energy efficient Eurotech design and the high-performance efficiency of the NVIDIA accelerators allowed the engineering of the world’s most efficient supercomputer. Measures taken on the Eurora system, which is equipped with two Intel Xeon E5-2687W CPUs and two NVIDIA K20 accelerators per node, delivered 3,150 megaflops per watt, which is considerably higher than the top system on the most recent Green500 list of the world’s most efficient supercomputers.

“This record result is enabled by the energy efficiency and performance driven Eurotech design leveraging the NVIDIA Tesla K20 accelerators.” – said Giampietro Tecchiolli, Eurotech CTO – “In addition to that, Eurotech’s Aurora Hot Water Cooling technology allows “free cooling”, air conditioning avoidance, in warm climates like the Italian one, reaching record low data center PUE values (1.05), while providing complete flexibility on data center location”

The Eurora and the Aurora Tigon systems not only benefit from system energy efficiency, but also make the entire data center more efficient and more compact, providing energy and space savings that can reduce TCO by an average of 30%-50%, depending on data center location, structure and industry. Compared to a conventional air-cooled system, Aurora HPCs enable data centers to save up to 50 percent on energy bills, while reducing space occupancy by 5 times due to higher density system configurations.

On the “green” side, this is equivalent to a reduction of more than 1,500 tons of CO2 emissions per rack in 5 years. In addition, the water heated up in the Aurora systems can be re-used to heat buildings, drive adsorption chillers for air conditioning or allow for trigeneration, the combined production of electricity, heating and cooling. The CINECA Eurora supercomputer architecture is based on dual socket dual PCI-e connected accelerator nodes, mounted together in compact chassis by cable free backplanes, which are assembled to form the distinctive looking Eurora rack. Water cooling and electronics design allows for very high densities to be reached with a performance of 350 TFlops per rack.