BIG DATA

It’s modelled the evolution of the universe, simulated the behaviour of proteins and explored how different bridge types respond to weather conditions and turbulence. Now the High Performance Computing (HPC) facility at The University of Nottingham has been overhauled — more than doubling the system's capacity to the equivalent of 2,500 home PCs and putting 110 terabytes of disc space at the institution's disposal.

The original HPC was launched in June 2005, and is thought to have attracted more than £15m of research funding to the University. More than 1.4 million jobs have run on the system since then, aiding research in fields from maths and physics to geography. But four years is a long time in computing, and the HPC is now ready for an update.

“Four years ago we were one of the first universities in the country to invest in this kind of high performance facility,” said Dr Frazer Pearce, Associate Professor and Reader in Astrophysics and member of the HPC management team. “Now we’re working with leading global technology company HP to install a new system that will be six times as fast, giving academics access to one of the most powerful computers in the country.”

The speed of calculation on the new facility’s 1,600 processors means that a job that would take more than 100 years on a standard computer will take just a month on the HPC. 

Since June 2005 research projects across the University have taken advantage of the HPC’s huge processing capacity. There’s no space for waste in the system. Typically, more than 90 per cent of the available computing power is being used 24 hours a day, all year round.

Dr Pearce’s own research has seen the development of models showing how gas is distributed throughout the universe over huge periods of time. The data from the ‘Hot Universe’ project is currently being analysed. But it has already revealed that ‘fossil groups’ of galaxies — large single galaxies lying at the centre of a halo of hot gas — are galaxy groups formed in the early universe where the neighbours have been absorbed into a single unit over time. 

Other projects have looked at the way drops of liquid act and interact, how water behaves in floods and tsunamis, how different bridge types respond to weather conditions and turbulence, and tracking the behaviour of particles in supercritical fluids.

The facility has also encouraged cross-school and faculty collaboration. For example, work on how gases behave in space has informed studies modelling how liquids behave on Earth.

Funding for the new computer has come from the government’s Science Research Investment Fund.