Super Chameleon takes on Supercomputers

The 2012 International Supercomputing Conference kicked off on Monday in Hamburg with an opening session that recognized the world’s fastest supercomputers and provided a look at trends in high-performance computing. The June 2012 Top500 list can be found here.

Congratulations to SuperMUC, the most powerful system in Europe and No.4 on the list. SuperMUC is an IBM iDataplex system running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2. It is installed at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (Leibniz-Rechenzentrum LRZ) in Munich and is available to all European researchers to expand the frontiers of science and engineering. According to ZDNet, SuperMUC contains more than 150,000 cores and can provide peak performance of up to three petaflops — which is described as the equivalent of the processing power of 110,000 personal computers.

SuperMUC powered by SUSE

SuperMUC uses a new, revolutionary form of warm water cooling developed by IBM. Active components like processors and memory are directly cooled with water that can have an inlet temperature of up to 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius). This hot-water cooling technology, together with very innovative system software,  promises to cut the energy consumption of the system. In addition, all LRZ buildings will be heated re-using this energy.

SUSE Linux Enterprise runs one third of the world’s top 25 supercomputers, including Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, NASA’s Pleiades at Ames Research Center and TSUBAME 2.0 at Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Each supercomputer in the Top500 is as unique as the names they are given. What’s more, the majority run on Linux, proving why companies like Adaptive Computing, Appro International, Bright Computing, Bull, ClusterVision, HP, IBM, Penguin Computing, SGI and Teradata are incorporating SUSE Linux Enterprise Server into the high-performance computing solutions they are providing to their own customers.

Leveraging the economics of open source software and low cost hardware, SUSE, together with its partners, is bringing the same high performance computing capabilities utilized in supercomputers to enterprises and mid-market customers in a range of industries, including manufacturing, research and academic organizations.