High Performance Computing
Welcome to the Imperial College High Performance Computing Service.
The College has a central computer room, specially designed to support High Performance Computing (HPC). Three large HPC systems are available, an SGI Altix UV shared memory system, a commodity PC cluster comprised of a number of sub-clusters from Dell, Viglen and Supermicro. A number of sub-clusters are incorporated into the service providing dedicated resources for individual research groups and access to specially configured HPC nodes.
The third system, cx2, was installed in September 2009 and upgraded in September 2010. This is an SGI Altix ICE 8200 EX system. This massively parallel processing (MPP) system will be targeted for running large parallel jobs using more than 64 processors. A strong emphasis is being placed on performance and optimisation of the programs to be run on the system.
With this selection of different equipment the HPC service is able to provide computational and cloud resources to the College research community with high efficiency and at low cost.
These systems are college-wide facilities for use by researchers in all disciplines. For detailed information please see the System Installations section.
ICT has 2 specialist members of staff to commission and run the HPC services. They are Simon Burbidge and Matt Harvey.
These systems are providing a substantial computing capacity to researchers at the college. This will accelerate current projects which use HPC as a major tool. In addition, researchers who are currently constrained to desktop computing resources will be able to expand the scope of their research by using the facilities.
The total quantity of CPU resources now available across the systems is now over 10,000 cores.
Registered users of the service will automatically receive service information by e-mail.
cx1 changes
Parts of the cx1 system are now reaching the end of their working lifetime and are being retired from service. This includes the older compute nodes and some of the storage. New components are being installed to replace the worn out parts. This process is normally does not affect the users of the systems and is transparent. However, there are some changes which might affect some runs, please see this web page for details. Our aim is to minimise disruption to users and allow work to continue to run unchanged while we upgrade.
HPC Service Development
We are pleased to announce that the College has agreed a further 2 years of funding for the HPC service maintaing the current level of investment through 2011/12 and 2012/13. We are delighted that the College continues to recognise the importance of HPC to its research programmes . The commitment to the HPC service will also help to attract additional grants for the computational components of research projects as well as facilitating research which has larger HPC requirements.
We would like to express our thanks to the research groups in the College for their support of the HPC service and for the supporting statments and materials provided to help make the case for future service.
Please contact Simon Burbidge for any further information or queries.
