Gateway: New high performance computing facility for EFDA task force on integrated Tokamak modelling

Paper in proceeding, 2010

The EFDA task force on Integrated Tokamak Modelling (ITM-TF) is providing the EU fusion community with a complete and flexible suite of reliable software tools and codes able to simulate the next ITER and DEMO plasma discharges. EFDA has launched the Gateway project as the first computing facility to be jointly used by EU fusion associations. The Gateway has been designed to allow the ITM-TF members to work together on a common platform and share their codes, developments tools and technologies as well as to make able the inter-operation with tera-scale supercomputer facilities. Technically the Gateway is a rather small high computing facility in operation since 2008, with 1 Teraflops of theoretical peak and 100 Terabytes shared storage area for experimental and simulation data. This paper describes the information technologies involved in the Gateway facility, particularly as regards the low latency interconnect network for multi-core platform as well as fast I/O solutions implemented with storage over Infiniband and high performance parallel file systems. The solutions adopted on the Gateway facility had undergone to specific benchmarks showing excellent performances in typical fusion data handling issues. Finally the interoperability between Gateway and ENEA CRESCO supercomputer will be described showing the access solutions that allow the exploitation of tera-scale supercomputer facilities.