Craig Morris (left) and George Morris (right) examine a server blade in front of the Cirrus SGI ICE XA supercomputer at EPCC.
Businesses could dramatically cut the time taken to bring new products and services to market with help from a new SGI supercomputer at EPCC, the UK’s leading supercomputing center based at the University of Edinburgh.
Called, Cirrus, the new system is a state-of-the art SGI ICE XA cluster with 56 compute nodes and an Infiniband interconnect. There are 36 cores per node providing 2016 cores in total. Hyperthreading is enabled on each node providing a total of 72 threads per node. Each node has 256GB RAM. Three login nodes, with identical hardware to the compute nodes, are provided for general use. Local Lustre storage is provided by a single Lustre filesystem with 200TB of disk space and users will have access to EPCC’s considerable data storage and archiving services.
“This newly installed computing power – in tandem with EPCC’s in-house expertise – means we are well placed to help businesses meet many of the computational challenges associated with developing new products and services,” said George Graham, Commercial Manager of EPCC.
Cirrus is housed at the University’s Advanced Computing Facility at Easter Bush, which also hosts the UK National supercomputing service, called ARCHER.
To celebrate the launch of Cirrus, EPCC is offering free time and support to the first 20 companies that apply to use the system through their website www.epcc.ed.ac.uk.
