Blue Ice and Wales, an HPC story [UPDATED]

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My buddy Toby Gavin (hi, Toby) sent me this bit of news from the UK about a new super in Wales

Blue Ice, a new supercomputer, now operational at Wales’ Technium Pembrokeshire in The Mike Barnsley Centre for Research, enables researchers to more quickly understand the impact of environmental changes past, present and future – such as melting glaciers, melting ice sheets and rising sea-levels – on today’s World.  OCF, the UK’s premier High Performance Computing integrator, is responsible for the overall design, implementation and ongoing support of the Blue Ice supercomputer.

…OCF’s unique design consists of 80 IBM HS21 Blades running dual quad core processors – totalling 720 cores and 8 CELL processor blades with Voltaire Infiniband interconnect.  In addition,   5 DCV workstations and 4 CUBE displays provide visualization capabilities to the facility. There is 10TB of IBM DS4700 storage with IBM GPFS (General Parallel File System) a high-performance shared-disk file system that can provide fast, reliable data access from all nodes in a homogenous or heterogeneous cluster.

The OCF reference there is to Sheffield-based HPC provider OCF, about which I wrote in a piece on HPC in Europe and the UK back in September.
[UPDATE] Turns out that there was an error in the source material for this story. Blue Ice isn’t a Blue Gene as originally reported.