INDUSTRY

The University of Galway, on behalf of the new Irish Centre for High End Computing (ICHEC), has chosen Bull to provide a new supercomputer to help Irish scientists with larger EU research projects. Currently, scientists have limited access to the computing facilities needed to develop research patterns and projects in line with the international community. The ICHEC will deliver the availability of internationally competitive platforms and help promote Ireland’s emerging research and development status. The new supercomputer, the single biggest Intel Itanium based system in Ireland, will not only allow high performance computing (HPC) to be applied in many more areas of research but will also give existing users the scope to raise their levels of research, providing increased granularity and capability to run job sizes /routines, which were not feasible on existing facilities. Bull will supply a Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) based Shared Memory System (based on the Bull NovaScale NS6320 SMP system) running 32 Itanium II processors at 1.5Ghz and 256GB of RAM along with ancillary storage and a further 4 processor test system. This will provide much increased cover to run codes to support research efforts in fields such as Computational Chemistry, Biomechanics, Climate modelling and so forth. “Although still in the development phase, the ICHEC aims to put Ireland on the map, in computational terms. Bull is very experienced in this field and we are confident that with its technology and expertise we can create an enviable research facility for every scientist in Europe.” said Andy Shearer, director at ICHEC. The system will run Bull Advanced Server (BAS) which is an HPC specific Linux Version developed specifically to enhance the HPC working environment of the NovaScale range over and above standard Linux operating system releases. Future developments to support growth are expected to see further NovaScale systems installed together with fast Quadrics clustering, bringing the number of processors to 128 and at the same time quadrupling the direct RAM to 1TB. "The new ICHEC is a landmark project for Irish computing that will significantly increase research levels in Ireland's growing R&D arena", said Adam Martin, Enterprise Marketing Manager, Intel EMEA "Intel is very excited to be providing Itanium processor-based solutions to enable the Irish scientists to pursue cutting edge research." "Bull is committed to expanding the boundaries of research through the use of high performance computing. We’ve already worked with a number of research institutions across Europe and the decision by the ICHEC to use Bull to support the new initiative is testament to our standing in the industry." said Mike Dunk, Managing Director, Bull in the United Kingdom