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13 Jul 2007
Size does matter for high-performing computing (HPC) VAR OCF, which has just implemented and upgraded the UK’s most powerful academic supercomputer at Reading University.
The seven-figure investment by the university will mean that its Advanced Computing and Emerging Technologies (ACET) Centre can use the supercomputer for not just specific applications. Other HPC codes in areas such as weather and life research and computer-aided engineering can also be adopted, according to Julian Fielden, managing director at OCF.
“Reading is a long-standing customer of ours and the original solution was one we put in several years ago,” he said. “We designed, installed and are supporting this latest upgrade, which is itself designed to be scalable. I have no doubt that in a few years we will be upgrading this system again.”
Chris Guy, head of the School of Systems Engineering at the university, said: “The supercomputer will vastly improve our capability to model many aspects of our world, including such things as climate change, novel drugs and financial markets.
“More accurate predictions in each of these areas, as a result of better modelling, will enable us to make real changes to people’s lives by, for example, showing where flood defences should be built or speeding up the development of life-saving drugs.”
The university’s ACET Centre upgraded its IBM Blade Centre with 700 JS21 blades, equipped with 3040 IBM PowerPC 970 processor cores. It is reaching a measured performance of 19.04 TFlops and has access to 60 TBs of storage. It ranked 36th in the June 2007 top 500 list of the world’s biggest supercomputers and is the second most powerful computer in the UK overall.
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