Frankfurt, Germany (July 15th, 2015) - Boston Limited, now in its 22nd year as a global technology partner for Super Micro Computer (NASDAQ: SMCI), is delighted to announce that JMI University's entry into the ISC 2015 Student Cluster Competition has been awarded first place in the LINPACK test. The JMI team were equipped with Boston's liquid cooled GPU cluster and have managed to smash the 10.18Tflop mark previously set by the University of Edinburgh, Boston's 2014 sponsorship team, breaking all-time records at a staggering 10.78Tflops. The recorded score produced 3.59 Tflops/kW which would achieve a rank of #6 in the Green500, a list of the most energy efficient supercomputers in the world.
This achievement was made possible thanks to the provisioning of a high performance, liquid cooled GPU cluster by Boston. The system consisted of four 1U Boston Venom servers, each utilising two Intel® Xeon™ 'Haswell-EP' processors, two NVIDIA® K80 Tesla GPUs and Mellanox® EDR IB connectivity coupled to a Mellanox EDR switched fabric. Liquid cooling technology by CoolIT Systems™ was also used to cool critical system components resulting in a lower overall power draw due to cooling optimisations across the server.
"Pairing liquid cooled technology with Boston's Supermicro-based HPC servers allowed the team to divert more power for compute and less on cooling. The student group was able to reduce the power required for cooling by removing a number of fans from the server and allocating more of their resources to compute nodes," said Michael Holliday, Senior HPC Systems Engineer and Boston mentor to the team.
"Having won the LINPACK challenge before, we knew that we had to excel in this year's competition in order to break our own record," said David Power Head of HPC at Boston Limited. "We implemented liquid cooling technology from our partners CoolIT in order to improve the power efficiency and performance of the NVIDIA K80s. Boston also optimised the air cooling in the Supermicro servers to complement the liquid cooling technology. This is a first for the New Delhi team as they are the first from this region to take part in this renowned event."
"Boston would like to extend its congratulations to the team and highlight our delight at being involved in such a fantastic achievement," said Manoj Nayee, Managing Director of Boston Limited.