Introduction to PDC

The PDC Center for High Performance Computing (which is usually known as PDC) is hosted at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. PDC is a key associate of the National Academic Infrastructure for Supercomputing in Sweden (NAISS) and provides high performance computing (HPC) services that are used for academic and business research. Those services include supercomputing and data storage resources, software for simulation and modelling, plus assistance from a range of application and system experts. Application experts are researchers with expertise both in high performance computing and in another research field, for example, molecular dynamics or computational fluid dynamics.

The NAISS supercomputer system at PDC is called Dardel. It is an HPE Cray EX which was installed in two phases: the first phase was a CPU partition installed during 2021. It is based on AMD EPYC™ 2.25 GHz 64 core processors and HPE Slingshot interconnect technology. The CPU partition of Dardel consists of four compute cabinets plus a coolant distribution unit in the front row, with three additional cabinets for storage and management in the second row. This partition has a theoretical peak performance of 2.28 petaflops, which far exceeds a typical personal computer (PC) or laptop. See the table below for some other comparisons between Dardel and a typical personal computer. (If you are not familiar with terms like nodes and cores, you can read the explanation about the parts of a supercomputer .) The second phase of Dardel is a partition that feature graphics processing units (GPUs). It was installed during 2022.

Dardel vs a typical PC

Note: The peak speeds listed in this table are based on node-level high-performance LINPACK benchmark tests, which give a measure of computing power in terms of floating point operations per second (FLOPS).
	Dardel (first phase) CPUs	PC
Nodes	858	1
Cores	109,824	16
Peak speed	3175 TFLOPS	0.7 TFLOPS
Memory	323,936 GB	16 GB
Energy consumption	630,000 W	100 W

PDC is involved with various national and international projects and research centres that work to promote the use of high performance computing in research, and to improve the existing HPC infrastructures for research in Sweden and in Europe, as well as paving the way to making exascale computing a reality. You can see the projects and centres that PDC is working with .