QPACE2

[2] It is a combined effort of the particle physics group at the University of Regensburg and the Italian company Eurotech.

Many current supercomputers are hybrid architectures that use accelerator cards with a PCIe interface to boost the compute performance.

However, it also comes with several disadvantages: The QPACE 2 architecture addresses these disadvantages by a node design in which a single low-power Intel Haswell E3 host CPU accommodates four Xeon Phi 7120X accelerator cards for computational power and one dual-port FDR InfiniBand network interface card for external communication.

QPACE 2 relies on a warm-water cooling solution to achieve this packaging and power density.

This architecture also allows the Xeon Phis to do peer-to-peer communication via PCIe and to directly access the external network without having to go through the host CPU.

In principle, any cards supporting PCIe, e.g., accelerators such as GPUs and other network technologies than InfiniBand, can be used as long as form factor and power specifications are met.

The CPU card provides two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces that are used to control the nodes and to boot the operating system.

The nodes of the QPACE 2 supercomputer are cooled by water using an innovative concept based on roll-bond technology.

The diskless nodes are operated using a standard Linux distribution (CentOS 7), which is booted over the Ethernet network.

The Xeon Phis are running the freely available Intel Manycore Platform Software Stack (MPSS).