Lattice-CSC: Optimizing and Building an Efficient Supercomputer for Lattice-QCD and to Achieve First Place in Green500

Abstract

In the last decades, supercomputers have become a necessity in science and industry. Huge data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity and we are at a point where newer, faster computers must no longer drain more power than their predecessors. The fact that user demand for compute capabilities has not declined in any way has led to studies of the feasibility of exaflop systems. Heterogeneous clusters with highly-efficient accelerators such as GPUs are one approach to higher efficiency. We present the new L-CSC cluster, a commodity hardware compute cluster dedicated to Lattice QCD simulations at the GSI research facility. L-CSC features a multi-GPU design with four FirePro S9150 GPUs per node providing 320 GB/s memory bandwidth and 2.6 TFLOPS peak performance each. The high bandwidth makes it ideally suited for memory-bound LQCD computations while the multi-GPU design ensures superior power efficiency. The November 2014 Green500 list awarded L-CSC the most power-efficient supercomputer in the world with 5270 MFLOPS/W in the Linpack benchmark. This paper presents optimizations to our Linpack implementation HPL-GPU and other power efficiency improvements which helped L-CSC reach this benchmark. It describes our approach for an accurate Green500 power measurement and unveils some problems with the current measurement methodology. Finally, it gives an overview of the Lattice QCD application on L-CSC.