EPCC smash LINPACK record with Boston-powered liquid cooled GPU cluster

UK: Boston Ltd, now in its 21st year as a global technology partner for Super Micro Computer, is delighted to announce that the University of Edinburgh's entry into the ISC 2014 Student Cluster Competition, EPCC, has been awarded first place in the LINPACK test.

The EPCC team harnessed Boston's liquid cooled GPU servers to smash the 10Tflop mark for the first time - shattering the previous record of 9.27Tflops set by students at ASC14 earlier this month. The team recorded a score of 10.14Tflops producing 3.38 Tflops/kW which would achieve a rank of #4 in the Green500, a list of the most energy efficient supercomputers in the world.

This achievement was made possible thanks to the provisioning of a high performance, liquid cooled GPU cluster by Boston. The system consisted of four 1U Supermicro servers, each comprising two Intel Xeon ‘Ivy Bridge' processors and two NVIDIA K40 Tesla GPUs, Mellanox FDR IB as well as a FDR Mellanox SwitchX-2 switch.

Liquid cooling technology by CoolIT Systems was used in order to cool the CPUs and, for the first time, the GPUs; resulting in a lower overall power due to cooling optimisations across the server. The EPCC system is the world's first public demonstration of this new technology which is the result of over a year's research, design and engineering - something Boston is now delighted to make available to customers looking for ultimate energy efficiency and performance.