AMD GPUs Advance GSI Research Facility’s Heavy Ion Studies

AMD‘s FirePro S9150 is providing more than 3 petaFLOPs of performance for the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH during its physics research related to heavy ion studies. The compute cluster was designed and built in conjunction with FIAS. Within the next few years, the organization will build a new particle accelerator and detector facility.

In order to continue research, each of the 160 ASUS ESC4000 G2S nodes of the L-CSC cluster include four AMD FirePro S9150 server GPUs (graphics processing units) for a total GPU peak of 3.25 petaFLOPS single precision performance. The cluster is enabling Lattice Quantum Chromo Dynamics (LQCD) computational research by using one of the fastest OpenCL implementations for research applications in the world.

“We had excellent cooperation with ASUS and AMD to make this project happen in such a short timeframe,” said Volker Lindenstruth, professor at Goethe University of Frankfurt and chairman of Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. “The ASUS ESC4000 G2S servers and the AMD FirePro S9150 GPUs are an extremely powerful basis for the L-CSC cluster and they provide the compute capabilities we need for our research. The large 16GB of memory of the AMD FirePro S9150 server GPUs allows us to run most LQCD computations on one GPU without inter-GPU and inter-node communication resulting in very efficient LQCD application operation. We have chosen a multi-GPU approach with four GPU boards per server to enable an extremely cost-efficient and energy-efficient configuration.”

For more information, visit AMD and GSI.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.