InHPC-DE Project Boosts High-Speed Data Connection of GCS Centres

The three GCS centres – High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), and Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Garching near Munich (LRZ) – have each recently boosted their connections to Germany’s high-speed X-WiN network, operated by the German National Research and Education Network (DFN), to a data transfer speed of 2x100 Gbit/s. This infrastructural boost not only enables users to transfer the large datasets generated on GCS resources back to their home institutions more easily, but also facilitates the use of multiple centres by reducing the data transfer time between GCS centres by roughly one order of magnitude.

The upgrade was performed with the aid of the BMBF-funded project InHPC-DE, which was launched in late 2017 with the objective of pooling Germany’s leading high-performance computing (HPC) resources, providing users a means of performing simulations on the widest range of computer architectures, and ultimately offering a virtual HPC centre experience.

In the next phase of the project, the three centres will work together to develop more advanced data and workflow services as well as capabilities for distributed, collaborative, and real-time visualizations. The infrastructural foundations for this project phase are currently being laid by deploying additional disk and tape storage capacity and ensuring that the internal networks meet the new speed requirements. At JSC, this includes a new extended capacity disk storage tier (XCST) and a magnetic tape library with a capacity of 170 PB.

Contact: Dr. Thomas Eickermann, th.eickermann@fz-juelich.de

from JSC News No. 262, 29 November 2018