ACADEMIA

New insights into the structure of space and time, climate modeling, and the design of novel drugs, are but a few of the many research areas that will be transformed by the installation of three supercomputers at the University of Bristol, UK. At peak performance the multi-million pound supercomputer will run at 13 TFlop/s. The University announced the award of the contract to install the computers to a consortium led by ClusterVision. The largest of the three HPCs will be one of the fastest University research computers in the UK. Dr David Newbold, physicist, explained how the new HPC cluster will allow the University’s physicists to be amongst the first to examine results from the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle collider which is set to provide new insights into the structure of space and time and the origin of mass. Professor Paul Valdes, climatologist, said: “This is an incredibly exciting development. These HPCs will allow us to develop a new generation of numerical models that have a much more sophisticated representation of the climate system. This will give everyone much greater confidence in the regional predictions of future climate change.” Professor Steve Wiggins, Head of Mathematics and a co-instigator of the project, stated that “HPC has ascended to a new level of importance. Any university that aspires to be world-class must have this basic research infrastructure. In future HPC will be an indispensable tool in every good researchers’ toolbox. The University of Bristol is leading the way.” ClusterVision will supply, deliver, install the hardware and support the three clusters which will all run the ClusterVisionOS cluster suite of management and monitoring tools. Access to the computers will be available across the University’s dedicated campus research network.