Swiss National Supercomputing Centre
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The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (Centro di Svizzero Calcolo Scientifico, CSCS) is the National High Performance Computing Center of Switzerland. It was founded in Manno 1991. In March 2012, the SCSC moved to a new location in Lugano- Cornaredo.
With about 50 employees, CSCS serves primarily as a so-called National Lab users. This research proposals are evaluated and the best way to promote free access to the national high performance computing in a competition. In addition, it operates a dedicated supercomputer facilities for research projects and mandates of national interest, such as the weather forecast. It is the national center of excellence for high performance computing, and serves as a technology platform for computer-aided research in Switzerland. The data center is an autonomous unit of ETH Zurich and works closely with the local University of Italian Switzerland (USI ) together.
Building
The building at the new location Lugano Cornaredo has a column-free machine room area of 2000 m² and can be operated with an electrical output of up to 20 MW. For the cooling water of Lake Lugano, the computer is at a depth of 45 m pumped over a distance of 2.8 km to the data center. This results in very low energy for cooling is only needed and the data center achieved a particularly high energy efficiency with a PUE < 1.25.
Supercomputer
The supercomputer procurements CSCS can be divided into two phases: In the first phase from 1991 to 2001 tested technology was purchased to allow users the easiest possible access to the services of the data center. In the center of this strategy was the SX vector architecture of the company NEC. 2002 was acquired with the purchase of a computer type IBM SP4 first time a massively parallel computer in a cluster architecture as a production system. 2005 XT3 computer, a massively parallel computer architecture heralded with the procurement of the first Cray the second phase. Since then, the data center is purchasing new computer architectures early as possible before they have a generally available product.
Current computer
Former computer
National Supercomputing Service
The computer of the National User Labs are mainly of Swiss universities and research institutions located in Switzerland (especially Paul Scherrer Institute, CERN) used for their research. 2011, around 177 million compute hours for 80 research projects were awarded with about 700 users. Here, almost 2 /3 of the Terms fell on the four universities ETH Zurich, University of Zurich, University of Basel, EPFL. Regarding the application areas turn about 2 /3 of the computation time for research in the fields of chemistry, physics, earth and environmental sciences and nanosciences was used. In the various applications on the computers of the CSCS methods play an important role from the molecular dynamics.
Distribution of the use of the supercomputer of CSCS by research institution in 2011
Dedicated services
In addition to the computers of the National Labs User CSCS operates dedicated computers for strategic large-scale research projects and tasks of national interest. Since 2000, the numerical weather models of MeteoSwiss at CSCS will be charged. In January 2008, the first operational high-resolution weather model in Europe was taken on a massively parallel computer at the CSCS in operation. At CSCS also provides the Swiss computer cluster for the LHC Computing Grid CERN accelerator its service.
As an additional service, CSCS provides data storage services for the Swiss Systems Biology Initiative SystemsX and for the Centre for Climate Modelling C2SM ETH Zurich.
Research & Development
To support the development of its supercomputer services, CSCS evaluated for Supercomputing relevant technologies in terms of technology scouting and publishes the results as white papers on its website.
In 2009, the CSCS launched together with the University of Italian Switzerland HP2C the platform with the aim of preparing scientific codes of Swiss researchers on upcoming supercomputer architectures.