DESY APE100/Quadrics Configuration

The present configuration at DESY (May 1994) consists of two Quadrics Q16 (``tube'') and one Q1 (``cube'') This adds up to 256 + 8 nodes of 50 MFlops each, to a total of 13.2 GFlops performance peek speed.
Since August 1994, the two Q16 machines for production runs are located at DESY-IfH Zeuthen.

General Architecture

The APE100 is a general purpose SIMD computer, based on a 3-dimensional cubic mesh of nodes with periodic boundary conditions, each node being connected to its 6 neighbours. The machine has a modular architecture, the building block being a 2x 2 x 2 cube, while the biggest version is a 2048-node machine configured as a 8 x 8 x 32 mesh, with 100 GFlops performance peak speed. Such connection grids are well suited for the simulation of homogeneous physical systems (including lattice gauge theories and statistical physics).

At a glance, the APE100 provides:

  • 3-dimensional node topology
  • fine grained modular SIMD architecture (8-2048 nodes)
  • 4 (16) MByte, 128 registers and 50 MFlops per node
  • Hardware support for local (non-SIMD) conditional structures
  • centralized address and integer computations
  • 25 MHz master clock
  • 8 nodes per processing board
  • 1 to 16 crates (with 16 processing boards and 1 controller each)
  • For the modules processing board, crate and maximal configuration: Characteristic 1 PBoard 1 Crate APE100 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Floating Point 400 MFlops 6.4 GFlops 100 GFlops Data Memory Size 32 (128) MByte 512 MByte (2 GByte) 8 (32) GByte RAM to reg rate 400 MByte/sec 6.4 GByte/sec 100 GByte/sec [the MB in brackets refer to a maximal upgrade of per-node memory, offered by Quadrics]

    APE Future at DESY

    By 1994, the present configuration may be enlarged to one Quadrics QH2 (``tower'') with 512 nodes, two Q16 (128 nodes each) and the Q1, thus reaching 38.8 GFlops nominal speed. After August 1994, the two Q16's will be moved to DESY-IfH/Zeuthen in Berlin where an own parallel computing division is being built up.

    Here is more on commercial versions of the Quadrics.


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