HP Powers 1st Nordic Supercomputer in Iceland, Achieves 35 TeraFLOPS of Peak Performance

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By Ed Turkel, HP, Manager, Product and Segment Marketing Hyperscale Business Unit

High Performance Computing has become the technical foundation for advanced scientific calculation, simulation and modeling, and helps drive our information-based economy. Today the Nordic High Performance Computing (NHPC) organizations of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Iceland launched an innovative joint supercomputer project to reduce power consumption, costs, and impact on the environment.

What’s interesting about the NHPC approach is that they’re redefining how supercomputing resources are managed. According to the NHPC press release, Scandinavian countries spend millions of Euros each year on supercomputing resources and related energy consumption. There is a significant burden experienced by universities and other institutions associated with owning and managing individual high performance computing infrastructures. By centrally locating a shared supercomputing project in Iceland, a carbon-neutral country which features powerful natural resources and low-cost electricity and cooling solutions, the NHPC has de-coupled compute power from the research site. Multiple Scandinavian organizations can now share supercomputing resources and costs.  This is an important pilot project that will help drive the evolution of remote computing.

HP is helping drive this energy-efficient program and the system, located in the new data center in Iceland, is based on a cluster of 288 HP ProLiant BL280c servers with 3456 computing cores, achieving 35 TeraFLOPS of peak performance. The system also includes a 72 terabyte HP IBRIX X9320 Storage system.

The intense resources required by supercomputing projects require transformations in energy optimization and efficiency. And HP is at the forefront of this revolution, with innovations spanning power, cooling, management and infrastructure. From the HP SL Advanced Power Manager to the recently announced HP ProLiant Gen 8 servers, HP is helping maximize power efficiency. HP scalable HP BladeSystem and purpose-built HP ProLiant SL designs deliver outstanding performance per watt with control and capping at chassis and rack, advanced thermal logic and controls, and intelligent power discovery.

For more information on the Nordic High Performance Computing project in Iceland, read the press release or check out the Joint Nordic Supercomputer Project in Iceland web site.