Introduction to HPC MidlandsDr Steven Kenny, Director HPC MidlandsLoughborough University
Introduction• Loughborough has been running its own HPC
systems for the last 12 years.
• Largely academic systems, but have also supported industrial projects.
• EPSRC-BIS call in December 2011 was aimed at creating regional centres.
• One of the remits was to drive industrial usage of HPC.
Vision• Establish a regional Centre of Excellence for HPC
with emphasis on industrially relevant research.
• Enable direct access to World-class facilities to
businesses, including SMEs to benefit the UK
economy.
• Form a partnership between Loughborough and
Leicester Universities to deliver HPC to HEIs
across the Midlands.
Aims and Objectives• Support “research that matters”.
• Provide direct access to industry.
• Be flexible and adaptable in meeting the needs of
our industrial partners.
• Populate the centre with engineering analysis
software to address key challenges.
• Give priority to excellent research with direct
economic benefit.
Collaborate• Work directly with experts in Science and
Engineering at Loughborough and Leicester Universities.
• HPC Midlands will underpin that work by providing access to World-class facilities.
• Opportunity at the end of the sessions for discussions.
• Case studies highlight on-going work.
Why make a huge capital investment in HPC when you can pay for the capacity you need, when you need it? HPC Midlands provides cost-effective supercomputing on demand for research and industry, delivered via the JANET network.
Supercomputing on demand
Use our state-of-the-art hardware and expert support to: - Expedite jobs that could take
weeks or months to run in-house
- Enhance your existing HPC capability when you need to
- Run commercial off-the-shelf software from leading vendors
- Turn HPC from a capital to an operating expense
Supercomputing on demand
3,000 cores (48 Teraflops)11 chassis (18 blades each)15TB RAM120TB Lustre storageNon-blocking QDR Infiniband188 compute node blades:
2 x 2.0GHz (8 core) Sandy Bridge 140 with 64GB RAM (4GB/core)48 with 128GB RAM (8GB/core)
Soul of the new machine
Commercial software:- CD-adapco Star-CCM+- ANSYS CFX- MSC Marc- Intel Cluster Studio / MKL
Open Source:- OpenFOAM- NETCDF- pHDF5- PETSc (and more!)
Soul of the new machine
Progress• Machine already being heavily utilised.
• Awarded cpu time to a number of industrially driven projects.
• Developed a SLA working in conjunction with a number of partners.
• Developed agreements with independent software vendors for the supply of commercial software.
www.hpc-midlands.ac.uk01509 223110
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