Multi-disciplinary researchers from across the University of Edinburgh can now benefit from a upgrade to the university's shared High Performance Computer (HPC) System, known as 'Eddie'.
The HPC system, operational from July 2010, immediately doubles the compute power available to researchers working in areas including bioinformatics, speech processing, particle physics, material physics, chemistry, cosmology, medical imaging and psychiatry, enabling them to run more complex computer simulations and scenarios, and obtain research results more quickly.
A second planned upgrade for 2011 is expected to result in at least five times the current compute power of Eddie being available to researchers.
Despite immediately doubling the compute power available, the HPC system will generate less heat than its predecessor and have minimal energy consumption.
The university's system is fitted with iDataplex water-cooling features to remove 100 per cent of heat generated by the system close to the source, which, when combined with the use of Scottish air to cool the water, provides almost free cooling for much of the year.
Design, build, configuration, implementation and support of the HPC system will be undertaken by OCF.
The HPC system design incorporates: IBM System x iDataplex servers, running Intel's latest CPU Westmere E5620 Quad Core processors; 40 TB of high-performance data storage using IBM System Storage DS5100 and a combination of fibre-channel and solid-state drives, fully integrated with an existing 90 TB of SATA storage using IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS); and a combination of Blade Network Technologies GB8124R 24-port 10Gb Ethernet switches and Qlogic 12300 36-port QDR Infiniband switches, also Blade Network Technologies G8000 1Gb Ethernet switches
