QPACE goes Green

As a prototype, the QPACE supercomputer comes in at place 110 in the TOP500 list and has a computing power of 55 teraflop/s. Its special feature is that it is optimized for energy efficiency and can derive roughly twice as much computing power from a given quantity of electricity than the other computers on the list. Therefore it is the number one position on the Green500 list of the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputers. At the heart of QPACE is the IBM PowerXCell 8i processor. The supercomputer was developed by the IBM Research and Development Centre, the University of Regensburg, Forschungszentrum Jülich, DESY Zeuthen, the University of Wuppertal and the University of Ferrara.

The QPACE Network Processor

The following poster about the QPACE processor was presented at the Lattice Conference 2009 in Beijing China. It presents an overview of the design and implementation of the QPACE Network Processor. The Network Processor implements a standard Ethernet network and a high-speed communication network that allows for a tight coupling of the processing nodes. By using an FPGA we have the flexibility to further optimize our design and to adapt it to different application requirements.

View this document on Scribd

QPACE – QCD Parallel Computing on the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.)

The QPACE project is a research collaboration of IBM Development and European universities and research institutes with the goal to build a prototype of a Cell/B.E. processor based supercomputer.

This poster gives you an overview of the QPACE project, which is pursuing the development of a massive parallel, scalable supercomputer for applications in lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD).

The machine structure is a three-dimensional torus of identical processing nodes, based on the IBM PowerXCell 8i processor. These nodes will be tightly coupled by an FPGA-based, application-optimized network processor attached to the IBM PowerXCell 8i processor.

View this document on Scribd