Irish Supercomputer List Reflects HPC Growth

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irishlistThe fifth Irish Supercomputer List was released today with a full ranking of the nation’s HPC systems. Launched in November 2013 to raise the profile of High Performance Computing in Ireland and abroad, the list is updated twice annually with a continuous open call for participation from users and maintainers of Irish HPC installations.

The Irish Supercomputer List has matured and is now keeping pace with domestic change,” said List maintainer Dr. Brett Becker of University College Dublin. “After one list with no change we are happy to announce three new installations, and we anticipate more in 2016. The use of accelerators is becoming more mainstream, with nearly one quarter of installations utilising them. The global race to exascale is intensifying with major funding initiative announcements made in 2015, particularly in the United States. The latter half of this decade will be an exciting one in high performance computing and we may see the first exascale installation before 2020. We anticipate the total performance of Irish HPC installations to reach over 1 petaflop in this timeframe – no small feat for an island with a population of just over 6 million people.”

There are three new installations for the fifth list, bringing the total number to 28. Two new entries are at Trinity College Dublin (ranked #9 and 10) and one is at University College Dublin (#11). The combined number of CPU cores on the current list is over 75,000. The list also shows that Ireland is following a global trend of harnessing coprocessor technologies for HPC with over one fifth of the machines on the list making use of accelerators including GPU and Xeon Phi, with a combined total of over 106,000 cores. The total performance of all machines is 678 Tflops/s.

The Irish Supercomputer List is maintained by an independent group of computer science researchers representing industry and academia, including members at University College Dublin, Maynooth University and Queen’s University Belfast. Providing an international perspective are representatives at the University of Oxford and Durham University, along with industry representatives from Ireland, the UK and the USA.

 

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