OCF upgrades U of Edinburgh with iDataPlex

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UK HPC integrator OCF, have announced they’ve completed an upgrade to the University of Edinburgh’s HPC system (“Eddie”, cute huh?). The upgrade doubles the computing power of the previous system while reducing the facility demands

Despite immediately doubling the compute power available, the HPC system will generate less heat than its predecessor and have minimal energy consumption. There are several reasons for the reduction in heat emissions. Firstly, there are efficiency improvements contained in Intel’s Westmere platform. Second, heat emissions are reduced by the HPC system’s use of IBM System x iDataPlex servers, which are custom engineered for excellent energy efficiency. In addition, the University’s system is fitted with iDataplex water-cooling features to remove 100 per cent of heat generated by the system close to the source, which when combined with the use of Scottish air to cool the water, provides almost free cooling for much of the year.

The new system uses Westmere E5620 Quad Core processors (1,024 cores) with measured Linpack of 15 TFLOPS, and incorporates 90 TB of GPFS file system, and connects compute nodes via an IB network. A second upgrade in 2011 will double the number of cores.

You can learn more about the University’s compute resources at the website.