HPC service announced for UK scientists

An university alliance is to join forces with Cray Inc. and the Met Office to deliver a high performance computing service for UK-based scientists.

The Tier 2 computer, named Isambard, will provide multiple advanced architectures within the same system in order to enable evaluation and comparison across a diverse range of hardware platforms.

Professor McIntosh-Smith, professor of high computing performance at the University of Bristol and leader of the project, said: “Choosing the best architecture for an application can be a difficult task, so the new Isambard GW4 Tier 2 HPC service aims to provide access to a wide range of the most promising emerging architectures, all using the same software stack. Isambard is a unique system that will enable direct ‘apples-to-apples’ comparisons across architectures, thus enabling UK scientists to better understand which architecture best suits their application.”

Around £3m has been awarded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to help the Alliance achieve their aims. This Alliance is a collaboration between the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter. The new project will enable the Met office to gain better understanding of how their weather and climate models need to be adapted for these new emerging architectures.

Adrian Tate, director of Cray’s EMEA Research Lab, said: “We are excited to be a part of this important collaboration with GW4 and the Met Office as we work together to explore and evaluate diverse processing technologies within a unified architecture. By building a Centre of Excellence with GW4 and technology partners, we expect deep insights into application efficiency using new processing technologies, and we relish the opportunity to share these insights with the UK scientific community."

The project was unveiled at the Mont-Blanc HPC conference in Barcelona in January.