The visit to Center for Scientific Computing (CSC) was carried out on October 14, 2016. Based at the Riedberg campus of the Goethe University Frankfurt the centre currently operates two Linux-based computer clusters FUCHS, and LOEWE-CSC. FUCHS has 14 air-cooled and 5 water-cooled racks using AMD Opteron (Istanbul and Magny-Cours) with 39956 cores total, mixed 4X DDR-QDR InfiniBand fabric and, a parallel scratch file system with an aggregated bandwidth of 6 GB/s and a capacity of 600 TB. 41 TFlops peak perfomance.

LOEWE was installed in 2010 consists of 825 compute nodes (169344 cores total) in 36 water-cooled racks, across two server rooms, with QDR and FDR InfiniBand interconnects, and a parallel scratch filesystem with a capacity of 764 TB and an aggregated bandwidth of 10 GB/s. CPUs performance: 226 TFlop/s (peak), GPUs performance: 597 TFlop/s (peak). Until November, LOWE was one the Top 500 public machines in the world.

CSC Frankfurt integrated with other institutes as part of HPC-Hessen, which includes the universities of Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Giessen, Kassel, and Marburg, and is funded by Hessen State Ministry of Higher Education, Research and the Arts. Every second month training course in using LOEWE and FUCHS. These courses cover introductory UNIX, shell scripting, cluster computing and Slurm, and Python.

HKHLR (Hessisches Kompetenzzentrum für Hochleistungsrechnen) offers users twice a year with the HiPerCH Workshops - High Performance Computing Hessen Workshops - an insight into the high-performance computing with different HPC topics. For the spring HiPerCH 7 Workshop in Frankfurt two modules will be offered: A three-day workshop into MPI and OpenMP as well as an introduction to the TotalView debugger.

Special thanks are given to the members of the various European facilities who took their time to accommodate my visit and provide tours of their facilities. This includes (my deepest apologies for names I've overlooked!): Hans-Christian Jankowiak, David Palao, and Anja Gerbes at CSC Frankfurt University.

Originally http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/researchplatforms/2017/01/04/goethe-universi...