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Project Description
DEISA[[1]] is an abbreviation for Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications.
History and Funding
The DEISA project started as DEISA1[[2]] 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[[3]] in FP7.
Organisation and Aims
DEISA is made up of a consortium of eleven leading national supercomputing centres from seven European countries. It supports a pan-European world-leading computational science research by providing and operating a persistent, production quality, distributed supercomputing environment all over Europe. It aims at delivering a turnkey operational solution for a future European HPC ecosystem. By extending the European collaborative environment in the area of supercomputing, DEISA follows the suggestions of ESFRI.
Infrastructure
The DEISA infrastructure tightly 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 socalled associate partners will be connected to this infrastructure, too.
Consortium
Principal partners
The 11 principal partners of DEISA 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 4 associate partners are
- CEA
- Computing Complex
- Bruyères-le-Châtel, France.
- JSCC
- Joint Supercomputer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences
- Moscow, Russia.
- CSCS
- Swiss National Supercomputing Centre
- Manno, Switzerland
- The Royal Institute of Technologies - Center for Parallel Computers
- Stockholm, Sweden
Deisa Benchmark Suite
DEISA has produced a packaged benchmark suite to help computational scientists in assessing 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 have been chosen as being 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 has already been used by the EU-funded PRACE project as a starting point for their own investigations of benchmarks for the next generation of petaflop supercomputers.