The PDC Center for High Performance Computing (PDC) is one of Sweden’s major national supercomputing centres supporting innovative academic and industrial research. PDC is part of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm and functions as a branch of the National Academic Infrastructure for Supercomputing in Sweden (NAISS), which provides high-performance computing (HPC) services for academic research in Sweden under the auspices of the Swedish Research Council. PDC operates an HPE Cray EX supercomputer on behalf of NAISS. Part of the system was funded by KTH and industry and is used for commercial research and development via collaborative projects with PDC (for example, with Scania).
PDC supports academic and industrial HPC research by
- providing HPC resources, services and training,
- developing software for HPC research, and
- participating in HPC infrastructure and research projects.
The NAISS HPC system at PDC is an HPE Cray EX. It has a large CPU partition with 1278 nodes, each comprising two AMD EPYC™ Zen2 2.25 GHz 64-core processors, and a GPU partition (with a LINPACK performance of 8.26 petaflops) comprising 62 GPU nodes, each having four AMD Instinct™ MI250X GPUs and an AMD EPYC™ processor. It has commercial and open-source software suitable for many applications in academia and industry.
PDC also provides storage and data management services, including facilities for long-term storage. Additionally, PDC offers training (including a summer school and a range of webinars/seminars, workshops and courses) plus expert support for application tuning and scaling in a number of disciplines (such as quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics, fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, bioinformatics, materials science and neuroinformatics).
Software development engineers at PDC contribute to the development of widely-used modelling and visualisation software for HPC (GROMACS, Neko, UppASD, VeloxChem and VIAMD).
PDC participates in European HPC infrastructure projects that support researchers by developing code and techniques for utilising pre-exascale and exascale HPC systems or providing training and other assistance. In particular, PDC coordinates three EuroHPC Centres of Excellence – the BioExcel Centre of Excellence for Biomolecular Research, the Centre of Excellence for Exascale CFD (CEEC), and the Plasma Exascale-Performance Simulation Centre of Excellence (Plasma-PEPSC) – and is a partner in the EXCELLERAT Centre of Excellence for Engineering Applications. PDC is hosting the Swedish member of the LUMI Support Team (LUST) and takes part in various HPC-related European, regional and national projects, such as CodeRefinery, eBRAINS, the eResearch Persistent Identifier Consortium (ePIC), the European-level HPC support project EPICURE, the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC) and the Swedish e-Science Research Centre (SeRC).