NSC Sweden and Meteo France Selected Mellanox FDR 56Gb IB

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., a supplier of interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, announced that the National Supercomputer Centre at Linköping University (NSC Sweden) and Meteo France have selected Mellanox’s FDR 56Gb/s IB solutions.

Deployments by these two organizations bolster Mellanox’s continued growth and expansion into Europe’s computing landscape.

NSC, a part of the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC), provides hardware facilities to R&D activities in academia, defense and weather services and currently hosts Triolith – the largest supercomputer among the Nordic countries.

“Providing a high performance, reliable network for our researchers to depend on is a high priority at NSC,” said Patrick Norman, director, NSC and professor of computational physics, Linköping University. “Mellanox provides us with the high bandwidth and low latency required to support data-intensive applications, while also supplying the scalability needed as we increase the number of cores per server to accommodate our growing user-base.“

NSC currently has 40,000 plus cores of computing servers in seven individual clusters, each supported by Mellanox IB solutions. Its largest system, Triolith, supports 1,600 servers with 25,600 cores.

Meteo France specializes in European meteorology and climatology, providing precise climate models and weather forecasts focusing on severe weather situations that have impact both on safety and economy.

“When delivering 24-hour forecasts, we have 30 minutes to provide results through graphics for forecasters, who need time to run analysis. Network performance is key,” said Alain Beuraud, HPC project manager, Meteo France. “Mellanox’s IB solutions provide our complex domain architecture with reliable, efficient and high-performance network technology, which is required to reach scalability and robustness for our real-time applications.“

FDR 56Gb/s IB allows Meteo France to run ensemble forecasts – many simulations for one meteorological event – to more accurately determine the location and timing of a specific weather event. Meteo France currently hosts two supercomputers positioned on the TOP500. One supercomputer is dedicated to operations and the other one is devoted to research activities that involves preparation of next generation weather prediction, air quality models and climate modeling.

“Researchers at NSC and Meteo France both generate massive amounts of data simulations every day, requiring an interconnect solution that can keep up,” said Gilad Shainer, VP marketing, Mellanox. “Mellanox IB provides high-performance computing centers with superior performance and scalability to accommodate the needs of their end-users.“