Joerg-Stephan Vogt

QPACE - a QCD parallel computer based on Cell processors

QPACE is a novel parallel computer which has been developed to be primarily used for lattice QCD simulations. The compute power is provided by the IBM PowerXCell 8i processor, an enhanced version of the Cell processor that is used in the Playstation 3. The QPACE nodes are interconnected by a custom, application optimized 3-dimensional torus network implemented on an FPGA. To achieve the very high packaging density of 26 TFlops per rack a new water cooling concept has been developed and successfully realized. In this paper we give an overview of the architecture and highlight some important technical details of the system. Furthermore, we provide initial performance results and report on the installation of 8 QPACE racks providing an aggregate peak performance of 200 TFlops.

Integrated high-performance data compression in the IBM z13

The IBM zEnterprise® Data Compression (zEDC) feature provides integrated high-performance data compression to the IBM z13™ and zEnterprise EC12 and BC12 processors. zEDC is a combined hardware feature (zEDC Express) and z/OS® software solution that provides high-performance, industry-standard-compliant compression and decompression. The zEDC Express device and the z/OS device support have been designed to provide compatibility with the zlib open source library for both compression and decompression. The base z/OS operating system and z/OS middleware significantly exploit the zEDC technology to provide access to this compression technology across a wide range of applications. This paper provides an overview of the zEDC Express hardware feature, the different z/OS device driver interfaces for using zEDC, including zlib, and discusses how this support was integrated into different aspects of the z/OS software stack.