INTERCONNECTS

The Southampton Oceanography Centre (SOC) has invested £1/4 million in a High Performance Computing solution, supplied by Bull Information Systems Ltd. The SOC is one of the world’s leading centers for research and education in marine and earth sciences. Under the terms of the deal, Bull, a leading IT infrastructure specialist, will implement its High Performance Computing solution, based on its NovaScale servers, at the SOC research center. NovaScale HPC solutions have been designed to process large amounts of data quickly and efficiently. The ultimate aim is to improve the capacity of SOC’s analytical infrastructure. This will then act as a central resource to run oceanographical, climate modeling and geophysical applications for the organization’s 450 scientists and researchers and 600 students. “Large volumes of data are produced by the SOC as a result of using the national supercomputing centers. We therefore needed a solution that could not only handle the load, but turn the data into useable information,” said Vic Cornell, research development manager for the IT group, SOC. “Bull offered a complete solution that met our needs, combined with a good price performance ratio and strong benchmarking support services.” “Traditionally, high-performance computing was based on extremely expensive technology, using specific processors and software applications which simply limited its use,” said Phil Ruston, director of public sector, Bull UK & Ireland. “All that’s changing now. NovaScale uses standard processors and Open Source software, which means that the demand for the sheer power of HPC can be met much more cost effectively, and moreover integrated into existing IT systems. In the future we’re going to see more and more of both public and private enterprises going for the high-performance computing option to meet their data management needs.” NovaScale uses Intel’s new Itanium® 2 CPU technology. Since 1997, Bull has established and kept a very close partnership with Intel through the development of these 64 bit processors. With this deep knowledge of Intel technology and existing competencies for building high-end systems, Bull has been able to lead the way in addressing the technical and scientific computing market with highly competitive HPC solutions. The HPC solution for Southampton comprises: - A NovaScale 5160, 16-way server for OpenMP codes and MPI codes - 6 NovaScale 4040, 4-way servers for MPI codes - A management node comprising a single NovaScale 4040 server - A 1 Terabyte storage subsystem with fibre channel disks - A Quadrics QsNet I Elan 3 computing network for efficient message passing MPI and distributed file system PFS support - A Gigabit Ethernet network for management and connection to SOC networks - A complete HPC software environment including software development tools and cluster management tools. The SOC project will commence in January 2004.