Engineering On The Edge

The University of Oxford and a consortium of UK-based academic institutions have deployed that country’s most powerful GPU-accelerated supercomputer. Named Emerald, the system was unveiled at the new Center for Innovation in High Performance Computing at the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot.

The $5.8 million, 84-node cluster is equipped with 372 NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs, and can achieve more than 114 teraflops. The system ranked 159 on the most recent Top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. It will work alongside the Iridis 3 system in place at the University of Southampton.

According to the STFC, the system will be used for a wide range of scientific and engineering applications, including healthcare, astrophysics, bioinformatics, climate change modeling, simulation of 3G and 4G communications systems, and developing new tools for processing and managing medical images.

The debut of Emerald also marked the official launch of the e-Infrastructure South Consortium (Bristol, Oxford, University College London and Southampton), which will collaborate with the Department of Scientific Computing at RAL to operate the two supercomputers.

Source: University of Oxford