Cluster of Supercomputers
- an Alternative to Massively Parallel Computing -
Hermann Mierendorff, Anton Schüller and Ulrich Trottenberg
Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI)
GMD - German National Research Center for Information Technology
Schloß Birlinghoven, D-53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany
Email: mierendorff@gmd.de, anton.schueller@gmd.de, trottenberg@gmd.de
Abstract. We discuss the question, whether the parallel IFS weather prediction model of the ECMWF can efficiently run on a cluster of supercomputers. In a joint project with Cray Research, we studied C90 systems which were connected by Hippi channels. The analysis shows that indeed a very high efficiency can be achieved provided the right parallelisation, cluster partitioning, and mapping approach is applied.
Keywords. cluster computing, cluster of supercomputers, parallel computing, performance prediction, Cray C90, Hippi channel.