INDUSTRY

ClusterVision are pleased to announce the successful supply and full installation of a dual procurement for Compute and Storage clusters for a new university customer. The 270 AMD Opteron processor compute cluster with Myrinet interconnect and the 40TB storage cluster were ordered from ClusterVision following a competitive tender procedure. One of the computer managers at the University commented that they had been "impressed by the professionalism and thoroughness of the people from ClusterVision, both during the procurement and the delivery and installation of the systems. The final product looks very neat and tidy from the outside and is as tidy and functional internally." The compute cluster, now known as Hamilton after the famous Mathematician, Sir William Rowan Hamilton, will be deployed to a range of computationally intensive projects across diverse applications. The project is co-ordinated by Professor Jeremy Hutson, who will use it for his research on the collisions between molecules at temperatures close to absolute zero. In addition, Dr Mark Wilson will use Hamilton for the simulation of modern materials such as liquid crystals, Dr Richard Hobbs for modelling seismic wave propagation and Dr Charles Augarde for modelling the problems of tunnelling in soil. Dr Li He's research in modelling gas turbine engines, Professors Wojtek Zakrzewski and Richard Ward's work on computational mathematics and Dr Stewart Clark's calculations on the electronic structure of solids will also use the resources of Hamilton. The 40TB storage cluster is called the "Millennium Store" as it is storing the data from the Millennium Simulation, an international project led by Professor Carlos Frenk, FRS: "This is the largest simulation of the evolution of our universe ever performed." "Using an unprecedented 10 billion particles to represent 'cold dark matter', the simulation tracked the formation of cosmic structure in a typical region of a model Universe more than 2 billion light-years across, with a spatial resolution of 16 thousand light years. Approximately 20 million galaxies formed in the simulation." "The simulation was performed at the Max-Planck Rechenzentrum in Garching, Germany. It is one of the largest scientific computations ever attempted and the data analysis will keep a large team of physicists in Germany and the UK busy for many months."