BrENIAC: the new Flemish TIER-1 Supercomputer.

breniacYesterday was a good day for computational scientists in Flanders. The new TIER-1 machine, named BrENIAC, located at the university of Leuven, was inaugurated and is now officially open to all users of the Flemish university associations: UAntwerpen, VUB, UGhent, UHasselt, and KULeuven. The name refers to one of the first (super)computers ever built: ENIAC. This new machine will take over the task of the first TIER-1 machine (muk, located at the university of Ghent), which will be decommissioned at the end of this year. BrENIAC is ranked 196th in the current top 500 of supercomputers, and costs 5.5 M€. This is of course without the annual cost of power usage and technical personnel which will maintain the machine and provide support for the scientists running calculations. With its 580 compute nodes, containing 28 cores each (or 2 14-core CPU’s of the type Broadwell E5-2680v4), the number of available cores has roughly doubled. Also memory access should have improved, which gives rise to a theoretical threefold increase of the peak performance.

However, this peak performance is measured with “benchmark” tests, which tend to behave much better than real  life programs. This is because the average scientific programmer doesn’t write the best optimized code (ok, “commercial” programs these days may even behave worse :p )  for various reasons, time constraints being one of them. So my first task, before I start running my simulations on the new TIER-1 machine, will be to benchmark VASP and my own HIVE-code.

Two videos of my new sidekick:

 

You can see me in my front-row position in this picture taken during the non-academic part of the inauguration.

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