University of Southampton supercomputer to help give unprecedented processing power to business and academics
The UK’s most powerful GPU-based supercomputer, “Emerald”, has entered into service today, alongside the University of Southampton’s own supercomputer “Iridis 3”. The combination of these two High Performance Computing systems will give businesses and academics unprecedented access to their super-fast processing capability.
Both supercomputers were unveiled at the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, which hosts and operates Emerald, a GPU system utilising NVIDIA’s Tesla accelerator technology. Iridis 3, hosted by the University of Southampton, was launched in 2010 when it was ranked position 74 in the top 500 supercomputers worldwide. It has a 12,000 core Intel Westmere based general architecture/x86 based system.
Both supercomputers have been funded by a £3.7 million grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), to the e-Infrastructure South Consortium which comprises four of the UK’s leading universities – Southampton, Bristol, Oxford and University College London, as part of a £145 million Government investment in e-infrastructure.
To read some of the media coverage surrounding the IridisIII upgrade and launch of Emerald, follow the links below:
http://www.scienceomega.com/article/460/towards-sound-e-infrastructure-supercomputers-unveiled
