IBM Intelligent Cluster solutions power new university supercomputer

November 14, 2013

In October the University of Southampton switched on the most powerful University-based supercomputer in England and the third largest academic facility in the UK. Named Iridis4 the machine is designed to meet the demand for the use of supercomputing power for research purposes and it will allow more academics to work on a greater number of projects at faster speeds.

Over 12,000 processor cores

Worth £3.2 million, Iridis4 is powered by IBM Intelligent Cluster solutions integrated and supported by HPC. It is four times more powerful than its predecessor Iridis3 and has 12,200 Intel Xeon E5-2670 processor cores, one-million gigabytes of disc space, with 50 terabytes of memory.

The new machine is one of very few in the UK to include to Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, which can take control of some of the most demanding mathematical calculations to significantly increase its processing power. The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors are each capable of running at one teraflop, (one trillion calculations per second).

Supporting more than 350 research projects

Iridis4 will mainly be used for research by University staff and students across a wide variety of disciplines, from Engineering to Archaeology – Medicine to Computer Science. 350 projects are likely to run on the machine in the first year.

Meanwhile, Iridis3 will remain in operation, providing an important resource for industrial research through the e-Infrastructure South Consortium. This group of research intensive universities; Southampton, Bristol, Oxford and University College London, operate a ‘Centre of Innovation for the Application of High Performance Computing’– set up in 2012 with £3.7 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to upgrade Iridis3 and install resources at Rutherford Appleton Laboratories near Oxford.