Academic Supercomputing in Europe

Sweden

Statistics

Population: 9.0 million
GDP/capita: €23,300

Policy

The Swedish Research Council (VR) funds through the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) six national HPC centres: HPC2N, LUNARC, NSC, PDC, UNICC and UPPMAX. SNIC is responsible for the strategy and the development of HPC resources in Sweden. €4.5 of the yearly budget of €8.5 million is provided by the Government.

http://snic.vr.se/snic.htm

Supercomputing facilities for the academia

Evergrow Grid: IBM cluster (352 Xeon/3060)
HPC2N: Beowulf cluster (384 Opteron/2200), Beowulf cluster (240 Athlon/1667), Beowulf cluster (101 P4/2800)
KTH (including PDC): Dell cluster (884 Xeon/3400), Beowulf cluster (180 Itanium2/900), IBM SP Power3/112, Beowulf cluster (80 Athlon/1400 + 20 PIII/866 + 112 Athlon/2166 + 152 P4/2800), IBM SP Power3/40, Beowulf cluster (100 P4/2800)
LUNARC: Beowulf cluster (128 P4/2530 + 65 Athlon/1600), Beowulf cluster (210 Opteron/2200), Beowulf cluster (100 P4/2800)
NSC: SGI Origin 3800/128, Beowulf cluster (400 Xeon/2200), Beowulf cluster (120 Xeon/3200), Beowulf cluster (100 P4/2800), Beowulf cluster (74 P4/3000), Beowulf cluster (48 P4/2260), Beowulf cluster (33 Athlon/900), Beowulf cluster (16 Athlon/850), Beowulf cluster (16 Athlon/800), Beowulf cluster (25 Athlon/700)
UNICC: Beowulf cluster (99 P4/2800), Beowulf cluster (80), SGI Origin 2000/104
UPPMAX: Sun Fire15K/48, Beowulf cluster (34 Athlon/2000), Beowulf cluster (100 P4/2800), Sun cluster (280 Opteron/2400), Sun cluster/56

The figure shows for the past 5 years the peak performance of the #1 Swedish system and the total performance of all Swedish HPC systems.

National academic network

SUNET - the Swedish University Computer Network - interconnects local and regional networks at Swedish universities. The backbone capacity is 10 Gbps. Major universities are typically connected at 1 Gbps. For international connectivity SUNET has a 10 Gbps link to NORDUnet and a 10 Gbps to GÉANT. SUNET is operated by KTH.

SUNET is coordinated by a Board with representatives mainly from universities. The budget in 2005 is €18 million.

http://www.sunet.se

National GRIDs

End 2002 the Knut and Alice Wallenberg foundation (KAW) awarded €2.5 million to establish SweGrid – a computational and storage grid with 6 grid nodes each with 100 P4/2800 processors, 2 GB memory, 2 TB storage and 20 TB nearline storage. The computational and storage resources of SweGrid are located at the six national HPC centres. VR has allocated through its IT-Research Committee additional funds to the SweGrid project for research on grid-related issues. The total budget is €3.6 million.
SNICs Strategic Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) serves as steering committee for SweGrid.

Allocation of resources

The Swedish National Allocations Committee (SNAC) regulates the use of national computational, grid, visualisation and data warehousing facilities through evaluation of applications for such resources. It also stimulates the innovative use of these resources. SNAC issues calls for proposal every 6 months.

http://www.snac.vr.se

Acquisition and upgrade plans

List of abbreviations

HPC2N High Performance Computer Centre North, Umeå
KTH Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan, Stockholm
LUNARC Centre for scientific and technical computing at Lund University
NSC National Supercomputer Centre, Linköping
PDC Parallel Computer Centre at KTH
SNAC Swedish National Allocations Committee
SNIC Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing
UNICC Unix Numeric Intensive Calculations at Chalmers, Chalmers University, Göteborg.
UPPMAX Uppsala Multidisciplinary Center for Ad-vanced Computational Science
VR Swedish Research Council

Contacts and Addresses

Prof. Anders Ynnerman
SNIC
Campus Norrköping
Linköpings Universitet
601 74 NORRKÖPING

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