NVIDIA’s NVIDIA HGX high performance computing platform will power Tursa, the new DiRAC supercomputer to be hosted by the University of Edinburgh.
Optimized for computational particle physics, Tursa is the third of four DiRAC next-generation supercomputers formally announced that will be accelerated by one or more NVIDIA HGX platform technologies, including NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, NVIDIA HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand networking and NVIDIA Magnum IO™ software. The final DiRAC next-generation supercomputer is to feature NVIDIA InfiniBand networking.
Tursa will allow researchers to carry out the ultra-high-precision calculations of the properties of subatomic particles needed to interpret data from massive particle physics experiments, such as the Large Hadron Collider.
“DiRAC is helping researchers unlock the mysteries of the universe,” said Gilad Shainer, senior vice president of networking at NVIDIA.
“Our collaboration with DiRAC will accelerate cutting-edge scientific exploration across a diverse range of workloads that take advantage of the unrivaled performance of NVIDIA GPUs, DPUs and InfiniBand in-network computing acceleration engines.”
The Tursa supercomputer, built with Atos and expected to go into operation later this year, will feature 448 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and include 4x NVIDIA HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand networking adapters per node.
NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect RDMA enables the system to provide the highest level of internode bandwidth and scalability for extreme-scale scientific applications using Lattice Quantum ChromoDynamics.
“Tursa is designed to tackle unique research challenges to unlock new possibilities for scientific modeling and simulation,” said Luigi Del Debbio, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Edinburgh and project lead for the DiRAC-3 deployment.
“The NVIDIA accelerated computing platform enables the extreme-scaling service to propel new discoveries by precisely balancing network bandwidth and flops to achieve the unrivalled performance our research demands.”
The system is run by DiRAC — the UK’s integrated supercomputing facility for theoretical modeling and HPC-based research in astronomy, cosmology, particle physics and nuclear physics — with sites hosted at the University of Cambridge, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Leicester.
