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The Alenia High Performance Computing Centre
An overview of the Alenia Computing Centre
Quadrics has been commissioned by Alenia Aeronautica to install and manage a High Performance Computing Centre located within Alenia Aeronautica's plants in Pomigliano d'Arco. Together with our partners HP and Bull we have set up a system with peak performance in excess of 5 Teraflops, making Pomigliano one of the best equipped industrial HPC systems in Europe.
Making use of the ICT knowledge coming out of the scientific research and the academic world, the Pomigliano Centre provides the industrial market with system access, benchmarking facilities, technical support, and consultancy services. It is available to Alenia, the wider Finmeccanica Group, our partners and the wider community.
Why is Alenia installing a Supercomputing Centre?
As market enabler, with the establishment of an excellent Supercomputing Centre as reference model for several services and solutions for the industrial market's core processes, Quadrics supplies added value services mainly focusing on virtual and physical prototyping (VPP) and simulation activities playing a strategic role within the entire Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) through a dynamic, collaborative and flexible extended enterprise granted by highly strict security policies.
What is our distinction?
The Pomigliano HPC Centre is therefore able to satisfy not only the specific requirements of the companies within the aerospace and defence sector, but also to all the other companies actually running the high level industrial market providing them with the highest quality of services matching together SW and HW components, their interconnection, besides all the several applications in order to guarantee the best performances.
The Pomigliano HPC Centre: our High Performance Cluster Model
Quadrics has implemented the Pomigliano HPC system using a cluster of parallel machines with complementary features (different processor technologies, variable node size, variable memory capacity per node).
Features and benefits:
The main components of our HPC system are:
- standard, high performing, computational nodes (such as Intel Montecito and AMD Opteron DualCore processor, 4/8 GB of memory per cpu)
- high memory SMP nodes
- high bandwidth and very low latency QsNetII interconnect (Quadrics)
- 20 TB storage system providing a global parallel filesystem (Lustre)
- StorageTek L1400M backup system
Quadrics HPC systems are certified to run a wide range of ISV codes including MSC.Nastran, CFD++, Fluent, StarCD, Feko, LS-DYNA, Abacus, Radioss, Ansys, and PAM-CRASH. Provision of these packages on the Pomigliano System provides our design teams with a vital computational engineering resource. |
Services and solutions
Quadrics is responsible for the systems management, support and maintenance of the Pomigliano HPC Centre, applying our personnel and expertise to customer enquiries on demand.
| The core services of the HPC Centre are the supply of on demand CPU rental, server hosting and storage rental, technical assistance and support. In addition Pomigliano will provide: | |
1) Facility and system management
- Know-how and Intellectual Property preservation, development and management within the extended enterprise (Quadrics and relative partners);
- Products and projects timing and costs' management;
- Research projects developing environments;
- Know-how availability of technological methods, modelling and simulations, besides the capacity to define and manage complex and dynamic environments relative to the VPP (virtual and physical prototype);
- Multi-disciplinary, cross-functional data base;
2) Application management
- Performances and requirements' management;
- Virtual prototyping laboratory (project and realisation of environments, test, debug, integration, process definitions and standard processes, versioning, etc. ...);
3) Software development
- Licences management;
- New models and solutions' definition proposals and development;
4) Training
- training in HPC systems and services
- training in use of the virtual prototyping resource;
5) Optional partnership in R&D projects
- Standard business rules for build optimisation;
- Enhanced and structured supply chain, sharing projects development and relative risks and competences;
- Collaborative Extended Enterprise (in real time). | |  The High Performance Computing Centre |
The Computing Centre location
Located in one of the highest industrial concentration areas with regard to the Aerospace Industry, our HPC Centre represents a strategic and logistical choice, installed with the best modern and actual technologies to grant its best performances.
| | |  |  |  |  | | | | The temporary Data Centre building location | | The permanent building location of the Computing Centre | | | |
The location of our High Performance Computing Centre is:
Quadrics
c/o stabilimenti di Alenia Aeronautica - Capannone 12
80038 Pomigliano D'Arco - Napoli (Italy) |
Hardware Architecture ( > 5 TFlops)
 | Quadrics | QsNetII interconnecting the system | | Bull | Storage system and the Parallel File System (Lustre) | | Storagetek | L1400M Tape Library | | HP | 200 nodes 2 x Opteron DualCore | | Bull | 6 nodes 8 x Intel Montecito | | Bull | 36 nodes 4 x Intel Montecito |
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The computational resources: QsNet II, a dual rail solution
The Pomigliano system uses a full bandwidth 256 way network to connect all the nodes with an additional 32 way standalone switch providing double the bandwidth for the high CPU count SMP nodes.
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The computational resources: Storage and Lustre Parallel File System
The global file system provides a usable disk space of about 20 TB (RAID5 or RAID6), distributed across one or more High Performance BULL FDA2500 storage bays, interfaced with 2 Bull NS3045 servers, running the Lustre file system.
Lustre Parallel File System
- 2 x Meta Data Server (MDS), Bull NovaScale NS3045 (2 x CPU Montecito, 16 GB RAM); the 2 servers share a Bull FDA1500 storage bay via fibre channels
- 2 x Object Storage Server (OSS) Bull NovaScale NS3045 (2 x CPU Montecito, 16 GB RAM); each server is connected to the 1 FDA2500 storage bay via fibre channel (complete redundant solution)
- the MDS and OSS servers and Lustre clients on each compute nodes are connected via the QsNetII kernel communications service.
Performance
- 500 GB/s read
- 250 MB/s write
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The Backup Solution
| 1 x backup server: | 1 x NS3045 - Lynx | | | 2 x Montecito 1.4GHz/12MB | | | 16GB RAM | | | 3 x 73GB SCSI HDD | | | 1 x QsNetII Elan adapter | | |  | | | 1 x Tape Library: | 1 x StorageTek L1400M | | | 4 x LTO3 drives | | | 600 x tapes (1.2 TB each) | | | 700 TB compressed | |
| |  The tape library |
Number crunching cluster (Nodes HP - AMD Opteron DualCore)
Quadrics chose AMD-DualCore Opteron to implement a single 800 core partition for highly parallel applications
| 200 small nodes | HP-ProLiant DL 145 G2 | | | 2 x AMD Opteron 285 (DualCore) 2.6GHz/1MB | | | 8GB RAM | | | 2 x SCSI U320, 72GB HDD local | | | 1 x QsNetII Elan adapter | | |  | | | 1 management node | HP-ProLiant DL 385 | | | 2 x AMD Opteron 280 (DualCore) 2.4GHz/1MB | | | 8 GB RAM | | | 4 x SCSI U320, 72GB HDD local | | | 1 x QsNetII Elan adapter | |
Quadrics chose HP servers for:
- QsNet certification
- availability of PFS, Lustre (via QsNet)
- certification of many ISV applications | |  The 9 HP racks in the HPC Centre |
Cluster of High Performance SMP nodes (Bull Nodes - Intel Montecito)
Quadrics chose Bull Intel Montecito technology (IA64-DualCore) for a range of engineering applications that require large memory, are I/O driven and those that require SMP nodes.
| 6 large nodes (NS5165): | 8 x Montecito 1.6GHz/18MB | | | 64/128GB RAM | | | 1 x local SCSI (U320) con 8x73GB HDD local | | | 2 x QsNetII Elan adapter | | |  | | | 36 medium nodes: | 4 x Montecito 1.6GHz/18MB | | | (Lynx/Lynx-C) | 16GB RAM | | | 1 x 250GB HDD local | | | 2 x QsNetII Elan adapter | | | | | | 9 management servers (Lynx): | 2 x MDS (NS3045 - 2x Montecito) | | | 2 x OSS (NS3045 - 2x Montecito) | | | 2 x Login (NS3045 - 2x Montecito) | | | 2 x AdminServer (NS3045 - 2x Montecito) | | | 1 x Backup Server (NS3045 - 2x Montecito) | |
Quadrics chose Bull servers for:
- QsNet certification, the availability of the Lustre PFS, via QsNet
- certification of many ISV applications
- flexibility to connect together non homogeneous nodes | |  The 11 BULL racks in the HPC Centre |
Software Architecture
The computational resources of the software environment are the following:
| | | Operating System | Linux | | Compilers | GNU, Intel C/C++/Fortran, Portland PGCC/PGF90/PGHPF | | Parallel Language | MPI-CH, MPI-Quadrics, HP-MPI | | Libraries | Intel MKL, IMSL, Lapack, FFTW, HP... | | Debugger | Gdb, xdb, Totalview, DDT | | Performance tool | PAPI, vprof, Vampir | | File System | Lustre | | Cluster Management | Quadrics RMS, Bull NovaScale Master, HP Cluster Management | | ISV | MSC.Nastran, CFD++, Fluent, StarCD, Feko, LS-DYNA, Abacus, Radioss, Ansys, PAM-CRASH, ... |
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The Scheduler PBSpro and WebPortal eCompute
The High Performance Computing Centre:
- runs the automatic jobs execution, submitted by several users at the same time
- optimises the use of the computational resources in a non-uniform environment
- monitors the resources to ensure QoS
- bill delivering
- enables project development in a distributed environment ("grid")
- provides the ability for users to manage, submit and monitor their own jobs, remotely, using standard Internet protocols
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Contacts
Download the Alenia HPC Centre brochure
Download the Alenia Aeronautica HPC Centre User Manual
For more information on the Alenia High Performance Computing Centre, please contact us at hpcsolutions@quadrics.it.
For sales enquiries and/or to get your own account, please e-mail hpcsolutions@quadrics.it.
Whether you are a supported customer or not Quadrics welcomes suggestions, improvements, feedback or bug reports concerning the Quadrics HPC Centre's performance, its services and documentation. Please send your comments and/or requests to hpcsolutions@quadrics.it.
As part of the Company expansion plan, we are looking for strongly self-motivated candidates to join the current team at the Supercomputing Centre in Pomigliano d'Arco (Naples). If you are interested and qualified for the positions, please send an e-mail to hpcsolutions@quadrics.it.
Quadrics Ltd. is an equal opportunity employer and has a policy of respecting personal data privacy. See Legal for further information.
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