INDUSTRY

ClusterVision, IBM and ClearSpeed today announced that they will be supplying several new high-performance computers to the University of Bristol, an internationally recognized university and a world leader in research. The largest of these new systems will be among the fastest university research computers in the UK and is also expected to be one of the top 100 computers of its type in the world. At peak performance the multi-million pound high-performance computers will carry out over 13 trillion calculations per second. That is equivalent to the entire population of the world working simultaneously on hand-held calculators for about three hours. Climate modeling, new insights into the structure of space and time, and the design of novel drugs are a few of the many research areas that will be transformed by the installation of these systems at the University of Bristol. "This initiative puts Bristol at the forefront of high-performance computing," said Professor David May, Head of Computer Science. "The impact of these systems will be enormous -- right across all disciplines -- turning data into knowledge. It will influence both research and teaching. Universities that understand this will be the most competitive in the 21st century." The contract awarded to a ClusterVision-led consortium, working with IBM and ClearSpeed Technology, is the first and also the largest of the first round requirements to be awarded under the collaborative procurement managed by Tony Newjem, Purchasing Director, Heriot-Watt University for the UK Science Research Investment Fund (SRIF) 3 Project in the UK. ClusterVision will supply, deliver, install the hardware and support the three clusters, which will 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. "The solution put forward by ClusterVision, IBM and ClearSpeed was the best overall and in line with the University's research and development requirements," said Dr. Ian Stewart, who coordinated the procurement at Bristol. "In addition to firmly establishing the University as one of the top High-Performance Computing centers worldwide, access to new technology will maintain the University's leading position in delivering groundbreaking research." System Details The computational power will be delivered by 636 IBM System x servers each equipped with two of the latest dual core AMD Opteron processors and enhanced with ClearSpeed Advance accelerator boards to maximize the floating point performance of the system. IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) will provide a high-performance scalable environment to support a minimum of 100TB disk storage. The 2544 AMD Opteron processing cores have a peak performance equivalent to over 13 Trillion calculations per second. ClearSpeed Advance boards can each perform double precision floating point matrix multiplication calculations at 50 GigaFlops while consuming a mere 25 Watts of energy. This extends the system's ability to achieve the University's most intense peak performance needs while optimizing for cost, energy usage and the physical infrastructure constraints set by the environmental considerations of building the new HPC machine room on the Bristol University Campus. "Any university that aspires to be world-class must have high-performance computing systems as part of their basic research infrastructure," said Professor Steve Wiggins, Head of Mathematics at the University of Bristol. "The University of Bristol is leading the way by adding some of the fastest supercomputers in the UK."