Academic Supercomputing in Europe

Finland

Statistics

Population: 5.2 million
GDP/capita: €23,700

Policy

Supercomputing policy is made by a partnership of the academic community (represented by the Ministry of Education (MoE)) and the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI). Funding of the national supercomputer facilities is provided mainly through these two organisations.

Center for Scientific Computing (CSC) is the organisation responsible for national supercomputing and networking services and support. It is a non-profit company, whose shareholder is MoE. The Executive Board of CSC has representatives from academia, MoE, FMI and the Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT), an important customer of CSC. A Scientific Advisory Board, with representatives from all major universities as well as from various academic disciplines, supervises academic supercomputing and networking and sets the framework for advancing computational sciences in Finland.

http://www.csc.fi

Supercomputing facilities for the academia

Åbo Akademi: Beowulf cluster (44 PIII/866), Beowulf cluster (24 Celeron/1200)
CSC: IBM pSeries 690/512, HP cluster (260 Opteron/2200), Sun Fire25K/96, Beowulf cluster (20 Opteron/2200)
FMI: SGI Altix 3700/304
HIP: Beowulf cluster (11 Opteron/2200)
HUT: Beowulf cluster (99 Opteron/2200)
LUT: Beowulf cluster (29 Opteron/2200)
TUT: Beowulf cluster (33 Opteron/2200)
University of Helsinki: Beowulf cluster (135 Opteron/2200), Beowulf cluster (64 Athlon/2130)
University of Jyväskylä: Beowulf cluster (27 Opteron/2200)
University of Turku: Beowulf cluster (27 Opteron/2200)
University of Oulu: Beowulf cluster (86 Athlon/2130) + 4 Xeon/3000 + 4 Opteron/1600

The figure shows the aggregate performance of the Finnish HPC systems and the peak performance of the #1 system during the last 5 years.

Acquisition and upgrade plans

A budget of €10 million during the period 2007-2009 has been approved for the procurement of HPC capacity. CSC has started a procurement.
CSC: Upgrade of HP Opteron cluster with 256 dual core CPUs.

National academic network

CSC is responsible for FUNET, the Finnish University and Research Network. FUNET connects all the universities, polytechnics and research institutes and has more than 300,000 nodes attached to the network. The backbone operates at 2.5 Gbps, 655 Mbps and 155 Mbps. The international connectivity of FUNET is provided through a 10 Gbps and a 2.5 Gbps link to NORDUNET in Stockholm.

FUNET policy and guidelines are set by the Scientific Advisory Board of CSC, with representatives from research and university libraries. FUNET is funded by MoE (50%, through CSC) and its member organisations (50%). The 2004 budget is €7.1 million.

http://www.funet.fi

Allocation of resources

CSC, its Scientific Director and the Scientific Advisory Board allocate the resources. FMI has a fixed share of the resources; other projects are allocated resources based on their scientific and engineering merit.

National GRIDs

The Material Sciences Grid (M-grid) is a national infrastructure consisting of 10 clusters of different sizes. Together they have 642 Opteron processors and a peak performance of 2.5 Tflop/s. The M-grid initiative is funded by the Academy of Finland. The participants are CSC, 7 universities and HIP. M-grid is part of NorduGrid.

http://www.csc.fi/proj/mgrid/index.phtml.en

List of abbreviations

CSC Center for Scientific Computing, Espoo
FMI Finnish Meteorological Institute
HIP Helsinki Institute of Physics
HUT Helsinki University of Technology
LUT Lappeenranta University of Technology
MoE Ministry of Education
TUT Tampere University of Technology
VTT Technical Research Center of Finland

Contacts and Addresses

Kimmo Koski
Managing Director
Center for Scientific Computing
P.O. Box 405
FIN-02101 Espoo, FINLAND
e-mail: kimmo.koski@csc.fi

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