HPC Wales stretches its reach to Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland is to get what's touted as its first HPC service, courtesy of a deal between Fujitsu and HPC Wales.

Extending a collaboration that's been in place since 2012, HPC Wales says the vendor will sling £1.1 million towards the service, and seek collaborations from Irish business and academic partners. HPC Wales has spent £3.5 million developing its supercomputing network, which has its main hubs in Cardiff and Swansea.

Cardiff is home to a 162-node high throughput system based on Intel Westmere X56540 processors; a 384-node Sandy Bridge-based high capacity system; two Xeon-based large memory systems; and a 16-node “novel architecture sub-system” with Tesla M2090 GPUs.

The Swansea hub has four machines: 128 node and a 240 node Sandy Bridge clusters, a 16 node system and a 16 node GPU box.

HPC Wales' finance director David Elcock said “We are committed to delivering advanced supercomputing technology – and the training and support to harness it to its full potential - to researchers and businesses of all sizes throughout Wales, the UK and beyond. This announcement marks the latest significant landmark for the company”.

The usual target applications of data modelling, analysis, high-speed maths, simulation and visualisation are cited in the facility's release, along with software development and image rendering. ®