SciNet Tech Talk on The CHIME X-Engine by Andre Recnik  (Old site; new site is at https://scinet.courses)

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The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is currently designing a new special purpose supercomputer to correlate signals from a 1024 dual-polarization feed radio telescope in Penticton, BC. The supercomputer will accept over 6.5 Tb/s of 4+4-bit complex numbers from 128 custom FPGAs, and correlate this data on GPUs; an operation which requires about 7 peta integer operations per second. The current system design calls for 256 Intel Haswell based compute nodes, and a total of 1024 AMD Fiji XT GPUs, each with 4096 stream processors and 4GB of HBM memory. The network will consist of 1024 x 10Gb fiber Ethernet links. To reduce costs the system makes use of commodity hardware, careful software and network stack optimizations, and direct-to-chip water-cooling. I will present the current system design plans, as well as the software, hardware, and network considerations. Speaker: Andre Recnik (University of Toronto)