Academic Supercomputing in
Europe
Switzerland
Statistics
Population: 7.5 million
GDP/capita: €28,500
Policy
Three sites have large HPC
systems for the academic users: CSCS in
Manno, EPFL in Lausanne and ETHZ in Zurich. CSCS was established in
1991 by the Swiss government as an independent national supercomputer
centre but became in 1996 part of the ETHZ organisation. CSCS's
facilities, however, still serve the national R&D community
while
the other two sites are mainly used for local needs of the two federal
institutes of technology.
The Swiss federal government
provides the main funding for the three
sites.
Supercomputing facilities for
the academia
- CSCS/SCSC: Cray XT3/1100, IBM pSeries 690/256, NEC SX-5/16, HP N4000/24 cluster,
Beowulf cluster (48 Athlon/1800), Beowulf cluster (40 Athlon/1700)
- EPFL: IBM BlueGene/L (8192 IBM PC440 FP2/700), Beowulf cluster (320 Opteron/2400), SGI Altix 350/16, HP/Compaq Alphacluster SC45/100
- ETHZ: HP SuperDome/32 (Itanium2/1500), HP SuperDome/64 (Itanium2/1500),
Cray SV1-B cluster (16+8), Beowulf cluster (320 Opteron/2400),
Beowulf cluster (256 Opteron/1800), Beowulf
cluster (384 PIII/500 + 96 PIII/650), Beowulf cluster (160 PIII/1000)
- SIB: Beowulf cluster (30 P4/2400)
- University of Basel: Beowulf cluster (74 Xeon/2400 + 32 Opteron/2000 +
16 Opteron/2200)
- University of
Zürich: Beowulf cluster (522 Opteron/1800), Beowulf cluster (216 P4/3000),
Beowulf cluster (32 P4/3200), Beowulf cluster (288 Athlon/1800)
The figure shows for the past 5
years the peak performance of the #1
Swiss system and the total performance of all Swiss HPC systems.
National academic network
SWITCH is the Swiss national network for research and higher
education. Sites connected to SWITCH include the two federal institutes
of technology, CSCS, the cantonal universities, the cantonal technical
schools, and industry research laboratories. Its backbone operates at 1
Gbps but between the cities of Geneva, Lausanne, Bern, Basel and
Zürich there is a capacity of 10 Gbps. The connection to
GÉANT is 10 Gbps.
SWITCH is mainly funded by usage-proportional contributions from
member universities (45%) and by selling services to organisations and
industry (47%). The budget for 2005 is €10.5 million. SWITCH is
operated by the SWITCH foundation, created by the Swiss federal
government and the 8 cantons accommodating a university.
http://www.switch.ch
National GRIDs
The Swiss Bio Grid initiative
aims to create a grid in-frastructure
able to support the solution of life science challenges. The
participants are: CSCS, Biozentrum (University of Basel), FGCZ
(University and ETH Zürich), FMI (Basel), Novartis and SIB.
http://www.swissbiogrid.org/
End 2004 the Swiss HPCN Grid programme was launched with CSCS
acting as coordinating centre. It aims to build a grid research
environment suitable for production-level research tasks.
Allocation of resources
Researchers from Swiss cantonal universities and ETH institutions
who want to use CSCS' computing resources can submit twice a year an
application. Large projects are reviewed scientifically by the CSCS
Research Committee and evaluated technically by CSCS. Small projects
are only technically evaluated. The allocated computer resources are
free of charge for the researchers.
Acquisition and upgrade plans
- CSCS: Acquisition of a system planned in 2005.
List of abbreviations
- CSCS Centro Svizzero di
Calcolo Scientifico/ Swiss Center for
Scientific Computing
- EPFL Ecole Polytechnique
Fédérale de Lausanne
- ETHZ Eidgenössische
Technische Hochschule Zürich
- SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Geneva
Contacts and Addresses
Marie-Christine Sawley
CSCS
Via Cantonale
CH-6928 Manno (TI)
email: sawley@cscs.ch
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