Tuesday, January 15th 2008

Britain's Fastest Supercomputer Unveiled

Jan 15th, 2008 03:26 Discuss (26 Comments)

Britain's fastest supercomputer that could help answer some of science's biggest questions has been unveiled yesterday. With the power of 12,000 desktop PCs, the mammoth machine called HECToR is the country's fastest computer and one of the most powerful in Europe. It can make 63 million calculations each second, allowing scientists to conduct research into everything from climate change to new medicines. The purpose-built machine is housed in 60 wardrobe-sized cabinets in the University of Edinburgh's advanced computing centre near the Scottish capital. After years of development, Chancellor Alistair Darling is due to attend the official launch ceremony for the 113 million pound machine. "HECToR will enable us to do research that we simply could not do in any other way," said Jane Nicholson, of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the public body which acts as the project's managing agent. "We want to push forward the boundaries of knowledge."

Source: Reuters

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26 Comments on Britain's Fastest Supercomputer Unveiled

Mussels

Freshwater Moderator

i want to play crysis on it.

Triprift

just win 4 lotteries at once and ya might be able too :D

InnocentCriminal

Resident Grammar Amender

Musselsi want to play crysis on it.

I doubt it'd run very well even then. ;)

Triprift

I was thinking the same thing wont play max res max detail :shadedshu

Nex-

This machine needs at least a 50000000 Watt powersupply? :P

Mussels

Freshwater Moderator

Nex-This machine needs at least a 50000000 Watt powersupply? :P

OVER 9,000 JIGGAWATTS!

btarunr

Editor & Senior Moderator

"133 million pound machine"

What's the processing power in terms of TFLOPs ?

not a suicide-bomber

i doubt it's x86 :(

Mad-Matt

I cant help but think 12 linked ps3's would have been just as powerful and cheaper too boot ;)

#10

little geek

btarunr"133 million pound machine"

What's the processing power in terms of TFLOPs ?

"It is a Cray XT4-based system with a peak performance of around 60 Tflops, and it is located at the University of Edinburgh's Advanced Computing Facility (ACF). The next stage of the project, planned for October 2009, will take the peak performance up to 250 Tflops. A third phase is planned for 2011.":twitch:

#11

TXcharger

thats weak

#12

Laurijan

I would like the see it calculate Superpi 1 Million

#13

Deleted member 3

pti doubt it's x86 :(

With the power of 12,000 desktop PCs

With Macs running x86 there aren't many non-x86 desktop chips left. Besides, plenty of Opteron/Xeon clusters around. So it's probably x86.

#14

spud107

found this,

Hardware
HECToR Phase 1 Hardware Configuration

The HECToR Phase 1 configuration is an integrated system known as "Rainier", which includes a scalar MPP XT4 system, a vector system known as "BlackWidow", and storage systems.
Cray XT4 scalar supercomputer

The XT4 comprises 1416 compute blades, each of which has 4 dual-core processor sockets. This amounts to a total of 11,328 cores, each of which acts as a single CPU. The processor is an AMD 2.8 GHz Opteron. Each dual-core socket shares 6 GB of memory, giving a total of 33.2 TB in all. The theoretical peak performance of the system is 59 Tflops.

There are 24 service blades, each with 2 dual-core processor sockets. They act as login nodes and controllers for I/O and for the network.

Each dual-core socket controls a Cray SeaStar2 chip router. This has 6 links which are used to implement a 3D-torus of processors. The point-to-point bandwidth is 2.17 GB/s, and the minimum bi-section bandwidth is 4.1 TB/s. The latency between two nodes is around 6μs.

The system is held in 60 cabinets.
Cray vector "BlackWidow" system

In September 2008, a Cray vector system known as "BlackWidow" will be added to the Rainier system. It will include 28 vector compute nodes; each node has 4 Cray vector processors, making 112 processors in all. Each processor is capable of 20 Gflops, giving a peak performance of more than 2 Tflops. Each 4-processor node shares 32 GB of memory.

The BlackWidow interconnection network has a point-to-point bandwidth of 32 GB/s and a bi-section bandwidth of 397.76 GB/s. The latency between nodes is around 3.5μs.
Storage systems

The storage systems are accessible both by the XT4 and the "BlackWidow" systems.
Direct attached storage

576 TB of high-performance RAID disks are controlled by 3 controllers through 12 IO nodes. The disks are accessible globally from any compute node and use the Lustre distributed parallel file system.
Backup system

The backup system includes 40 TB of disc space, known as NAS (Network Attached Storage) space, which holds the users' home directory space, as well as other files which users wish to backup. Files are backed up initially to a 56 TB MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) disc space, from which they are staged to a tape system as required.

The NAS storage is held on BlueArc Titan 2200 servers. MAID storage is held on a COPAN Systems Revolution 220TX MAID VTL. The tape subsystem is an ADIC Scalar i2000 tape library with 3 LTO tape drives. The backup system is controlled by 3 net nodes through 12 Gigabit Ethernet connections. The system includes 2 redundant Windows servers running Veritas NetBackup software.
Phase 1 upgrade

Later in Phase 1, the storage components will be upgraded as follows:
Direct attached storage: from 576 TB to 934 TB
NAS storage: from 40 TB to 70 TB
MAID storage: from 56 TB to 112 TB
Tape drives: from 3 to 6

#15

Mussels

Freshwater Moderator

now if only the next revision was dual socket intel quads...

#16

btarunr

Editor & Senior Moderator

AMD powers the HECToR. Yippie....wonder why AMD isn't bragging about it on their website. They have the habit of bragging about small things....like AMD processors being used in making cartoons for kids.

#17

newconroer

Ah joy, another example of where our taxes go.

But at the end of the day, they'll still get the bloody forecast wrong.

Indeed a big 'Yippie!'

#18

WhiteLotus

ah AMD - plug this!

#19

Silverel

Duh, it was named after THE Hector Ruiz! All bow before the mighty... tool. Complete speculation, but it sounds like something he'd want to rub his butt on.

#20

Eric3988

I bet Vista might actually run pretty well on that rig....

#21

pepsi71ocean

I wonder what there benchmarking scores would be.

#22

mdm-adph

btarunrAMD powers the HECToR. Yippie....wonder why AMD isn't bragging about it on their website. They have the habit of bragging about small things....like AMD processors being used in making cartoons for kids.

Oh, as if Intel has never released PR about some silly new thing that no one cares about -- seriously, have some "sarcasm" tags around what you're saying next time. I seriously thought you were trolling for a second.

#23

Morgoth

Fueled by Sapphire

intel got its own super computer
what the name is i dont know exactly but the use it to calculate animater at the antimater testlab some where in scandivaia or europe
Edite-
found it sheck this video youtube.com/watch?v=3DzWuS9OJBc

#24

Morgoth

Fueled by Sapphire

100,000 cores...

#25

DEFEATEST

Oh ya! , well lets see it do this....................100000780767070987 X 2109820982089208202 + 198793992792879 - 397398729879979 rounded off to the nearest decimal, faster than I can eat a cheeseburger! ya, didn't think so.....

P.S I'm sure you could get at least 60fps on crysis with this thing.

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Britain's Fastest Supercomputer Unveiled

26 Comments on Britain's Fastest Supercomputer Unveiled

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