February 07, 2025 - by Maria Grazia Giuffreda
Goodbye and thank you for your service!
On January 23, 2025, in the presence of CSCS staff, Piz Daint was about to be shut down and its giant ventilators thundered in the machine room for the very last time. After Matteo Chesi, the system engineer who had diligently and tirelessly cared for Piz Daint in recent years, sent out the command to power it off, system and software engineers—joined by CSCS Director Thomas Schulthess and HPE representatives Eric Aulagne and John Hopewell—helped switch off the blowers, allowing silence to descend upon the machine room.
This was an emotional moment for the staff, as Piz Daint was an extraordinary system that ushered in a new era of supercomputing in Switzerland and Europe, enabling outstanding scientific discoveries.
The birth of a hybrid supercomputer
Commissioned in 2012, it started as a Cray XC30 multicore system, but already in the following year the NVIDIA K20x GPUs were added. It was in 2016 that Piz Daint went through another significant upgrade combining Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3 (Haswell) CPUs with NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs, making it one of the earliest large-scale GPU-accelerated supercomputers in the world. Its Aries interconnect provided ultra-fast communication between nodes, ensuring exceptional computational efficiency.
With its 27 Pflops, Piz Daint became Europe’s most powerful GPU-accelerated supercomputer making it the first European system to combine large-scale hybrid CPU-GPU computing for several years and consistently ranking among the Top 10 supercomputers worldwide.
A new era for Swiss Science
Piz Daint was designed to support a wide range of scientific disciplines, enabling groundbreaking discoveries across various fields. In Earth and Environmental Science, it enabled high-resolution climate modeling, significantly improving the accuracy of weather predictions and long-term climate projections. In Astrophysics and Cosmology, scientists leveraged its computing power to model the evolution of the universe, providing insights into the origins of galaxies and dark matter. Also in Materials Science and Quantum Chemistry, Piz Daint played an important role, it helped develop new materials and contributed to the discovery of next-generation semiconductors, batteries, and superconductors. In the field of Life Sciences it enabled advanced molecular simulations essential for biomedical research, such as in protein folding, drug interactions, and genome sequencing, ultimately accelerating the development of potential treatments for various diseases.
The Legacy of Piz Daint
Piz Daint was more than just a supercomputer—it was a catalyst for scientific discovery, a symbol of European HPC excellence, and a testament to Switzerland's commitment to innovation. As researchers transition to “Alps”, the new HPE Cray EX Supercomputer, they carry forward the lessons, methodologies, and breakthroughs made possible by this flagship system.
Farewell to Piz Daint, and thank you for the years of groundbreaking science and welcome to “Alps” more than ten times as powerful, water-cooled and completely silent.