Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications

The Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) is a European Union supercomputer project. It is made up of a consortium of eleven leading national supercomputing centres from seven European countries. It supports pan-European research by providing and operating a distributed supercomputing environment all over Europe and aims at delivering a turnkey operational solution for a future European high-performance computing system. By extending the European collaborative environment in the area of supercomputing, DEISA follows the suggestions of ESFRI.

History

The DEISA project started as DEISA1^[1] in 2002 developing and supporting a pan-European distributed high performance computing infrastructure. The initial project was funded by the European Commission in FP6. The funding continued for the followup project DEISA2^[2] in FP7.

Infrastructure

The DEISA infrastructure couples the eleven national supercomputing centres which form the DEISA consortium with a dedicated (mostly 10Gbit/s) network connection provided by GÉANT2 on the European level and the NRENs on the national level. New associate partners will also be connected to this infrastructure.

Consortium

There are 11 principal partners and four associate partners.

Principal partners

The 11 principal partners are:

• Max Planck Gesellschaft, Germany
• Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Germany
• Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain
• CINECA, Italy
• CSC, Scientific Computing Ltd, Finland
• European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, United Kingdom
• Jülich Research Centre, Germany
• Institut du Développement et des Ressources en Informatique Scientifique (CNRS), France
• Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, United Kingdom
• High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), University of Stuttgart, Germany

Associate partners

The four associate partners are:

• CEA, Computing Complex, Bruyères-le-Châtel, France
• JSCC, Joint Supercomputer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow
• Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), Manno, Switzerland
• The Royal Institute of Technologies - Center for Parallel Computers, (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden

Deisa Benchmark Suite

DEISA has produced a packaged benchmark suite to help computer scientists assess the performance of parallel supercomputer systems. The benchmark comprises a number of real applications codes taken from a wide range of scientific disciplines. All the codes are packaged into a structured framework allowing compilation, execution and analysis to be configured and carried out via a set of standard input files.

The codes were chosen as representative of the scientific projects performed on the DEISA supercomputers. The codes and associated datasets have been selected to be useful in benchmarking systems with peak performances ranging up to hundreds of teraflops, machines which are more powerful than a desktop PC by factors of tens of thousands.

The current suite contains codes relevant to astrophysics, fluid dynamics, climate modelling, biosciences, materials science, fusion power and fundamental particle physics. It has been run by DEISA on a range of its own supercomputers and records of the results are kept for comparison. The DEISA benchmark was used by the EU-funded PRACE project as a starting point for their investigations of benchmarks for the next generation of petaflop supercomputers.

Notes

1. ^ DEISA1 on Cordis
2. ^ Continued funding

External links

• DEISA