The CHIME X-Engine: A 7 PetaOP supercomputer with a 6.5 Tb/s network on a budget. Andre Recnik (University of Toronto) The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is currently designing a new special purpose supercomputer to correlate signals from a 1024 dual-polarization feed radio telescope in Penticton, BC. The supercomputer will accept over 6.5 Tb/s of 4+4-bit complex numbers from 128 custom FPGAs, and correlate this data on GPUs; an operation which requires about 7 peta integer operations per second. The current system design calls for 256 Intel Haswell based compute nodes, and a total of 1024 AMD Fiji XT GPUs, each with 4096 stream processors and 4GB of HBM memory. The network will consist of 1024 x 10Gb fiber Ethernet links. To reduce costs the system makes use of commodity hardware, careful software and network stack optimizations, and direct-to-chip water-cooling. I will present the current system design plans, as well as the software, hardware, and network considerations.
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2015 - 12:10 pm