ICHEC Announces Re-Allocation of Kay's Components

The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) is excited to announce a significant milestone in the programme to re-allocate components from the national supercomputer, Kay. This initiative, aimed at giving Kay's components a second life, has successfully attributed these assets to several research-performing organisations (RPOs) following an open competitive process. Principal investigators (PIs) have now been duly notified.   

Kay, which served the research community from 2018 to 2023, was instrumental to Irish research through the direct support of over 850 researchers across 23 RPOs, with many more researchers, typically experimentalists, benefitting indirectly through the secondary use of data generated on Kay. Funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), the supercomputer played a crucial role in advancing computational research in Ireland. Now, its components will continue to support scientific endeavours across the third level sector.   

The call for applications to acquire Kay's components was highly competitive. Ten RPOs submitted applications for 101 lots, vying for only 31 available. This overwhelming interest highlights the ongoing issue of under-investment in high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure in Ireland at both the national (Tier-1) and institutional (Tier-2) levels.   

ICHEC's Director, Dr. Jean-Christophe Desplat, noted, "The high demand for Kay's components highlights the urgent need for advanced HPC infrastructure in Ireland. This growing reliance on computational resources across various fields of research underscores the necessity for adequate support. It is particularly concerning given that researchers in many other EU countries already have access to HPC resources that are one to two orders of magnitude larger on a per capita basis than those available to their Irish counterparts."