High-Performance Computing (HPC) Infrastructure

HPC Hub

A High-Performance Computing (HPC) centre is about more than just supercomputers:

The ICHEC HPC Hub is a shared space where users are welcome to work with our staff. Find out more here.

High-Performance Computing (HPC) Systems

ICHEC currently provides the following supercomputers:

System	Stokes	Stoney
Service	National	National / National GPU
Manufacturer / Model	SGI Altix ICE 8200EX	Bull Novascale R422-E2
CPU	Intel Xeon X5650	Intel Xeon X5560
CPU Clock	2.67 GHz	2.8 GHz
CPU Cores	3840	496
Memory	7680 GB	2976 GB
Accelerators	N/A	48 x NVIDIA Tesla M2090
Peak Performance	41.01 TFlop	5.73 TFlop (CPU only)
Linpack Performance	36.56 TFlop	5.14 TFlop (CPU only)
Interconnect	ConnectX Infiniband (DDR)	ConnectX Infiniband (DDR)
Storage (Formatted Capacity)	175 TB	21 TB
Launched	Dec 2008 (upgraded Aug 2010)	Jul 2009 (upgraded Jan 2012)

Network Connectivity

HPC often involves very large data sets. To avoid a data bottleneck all of the ICHEC systems are connected to the HEAnet national research network, typically at 1Gbit. This facilitates fast data transfer internally between the ICHEC systems, to and from the member institutions networks, and externally to resources on other networks.

Researchers with particularly large data sets should note that their member institution's network may not be designed to cope with these traffic volumes.

Decommissioned Systems

Largely due to the high electrical costs involved in running HPC systems, it is not economic to keep them in production indefinitely even if they are still working reliably. It is cheaper to replace them with new systems with up to date processors etc. in the long term. To date ICHEC has decommissioned 4 HPC platforms, Walton, Hamilton, Lanczos and Schrodinger. Some details of these machines can be found here.