Xilinx Helps University of Regensburg Launch the World's Most Power-Efficient Supercomputer

Using a custom-design approach has made QPACE one of the most power efficient supercomputers ever developed, with a peak performance in single/double precision of 26/56TFlops and an average power consumption of 29kW per rack. This puts QPACE at the top of the Green 500 list; a league table for the world's most energy efficient supercomputers.

Prof. Tilo Wettig, Ph.D., of the University of Regensburg, Germany and Principal Investigator of the QPACE project, commented: We have shown, for the first time, that FPGAs can be used as network coprocessors to interconnect very fast processors in a massively parallel supercomputer, scalable to thousands of nodes.

The QPACE supercomputer uses node cards, comprising a PowerXCell 8 which is an enhanced version of the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM and first seen in the PlayStation3, integrated alongside 8 Synergistic Processing Elements and a Power Processing Element.

The maximum number of node cards in a rack is 256 and a typical system comprises four racks, or 1024 node cards connected through three types of networks. The QPACE team used Xilinx Virtex-5 LX110T FPGAs to implement the network processors (NWP), which interface between the processing elements and the interconnection networks, managing all network traffic for optimal performance.

QPACE represents over two years of effort from a number of leading technology providers, commented Patrick Lysaght, senior director, Xilinx Research Labs. Xilinx FPGAs are well-known for providing key network processing capabilities in modern wired and wireless communications networks. This research is especially exciting because it demonstrates how low-latency, high-throughput connections can be achieved by using Virtex-5 devices to realize core networking functions in state-of-the-art, power-efficient supercomputers.