Czech Hydrometeorological Institute Information Technology Operation

Head of the Information Technology Operation: Ing. Zdeněk KRIŠTŮFEK

Hardware and Software:

1. Computer servers SUN 4810 with HITACHI disk expansion units and SUN 450

and archival device operated by means of SUN 250 computer. SUN NETRA computers are used for web services. The computers work with an operation system UNIX system VIII and ORACLE and INGRES data bases.

2.Vector supercomputer NEC SX-6/4A for weather forecasting model ALADIN:

It is the parallel vector computer dedicated for float-point numerical computing. It has 4 single-chip vector processors of the SX-6 type. Processors have fast vector unit (4 vector registers 144 KB each) and scalar unit (with scalar 64bit registers). Main (operation) memory is ultrahigh-speed double data rate synchronous DRAM and has a capacity of 32 GB. Single-node SX6 uses the shared memory architecture and has memory bandwith (peak memory data transfer rate) of 128 GB/s. I/O peak data transfer rate (I/O bandwith) is 8 GB/s. SX6 series excels in the total balance of processing performance, memory bandwith and I/O throughput. NEC developed worlds first single chip vector processor for the SX6 series (it depends on high density CMOS technology and LSI design). One SX6 processor has peak vector performance) of 8 GFLOPS. The theoretical top vector performance of whole SX6 node is then (4x8=) 32 GFLOPS. SX6 is equipped with internal SCSI disks (2x73 GB) and with external disk array (2x286 GB). Operational system is SUPER-UX ver.R13.1 (on UNIX basis). SX6 has the software for controlling of batch jobs (NQS), FORTRAN90 and C++ compilers, MPI support. For SX6 controlling, service and maintenance is used small external computer IOX (Linux PC IOX) with 16 GB disk. There is PC computer (lambda) with Linux SuSE 8.1, with 2x140 GB disks for colaboration with SX6. (for the krosskompilation and backup of the /home disk of SX6).