DiRAC-2: Recurrent Costs for Complexity@DiRAC Cluster at University of Leicester

This award is for the recurrent costs of Complexity@DiRAC cluster at the the University of Leicester. It will cover electricity costs, support staff costs of the cluster which is part of the DiRAC-2 national facility.

The pathways to impact for the project are as agreed at the DiRAC PMB meeting on 21 November 2011 and subsequently reported on in the annual reports of the facility.

The high-performance computing applications supported by DiRAC typically involve new algorithms and implementations optimised for high energy efficiency which impose demands on computer architectures that the computing industry has found useful for hardware and system software design and testing.

DiRAC researchers have on-going collaborations with computing companies that maintain this strong connection between the scientific goals of the DiRAC Consortium and the development of new computing technologies that drive the commercial high-performance computing market, with economic benefits to the companies involved and more powerful computing capabilities available to other application areas including many that address socio-economic challenges.

Boyle (University of Edinburgh) co-designed the Blue-Gene/Q compute chip with IBM. This is now deployed in 1.3 Pflop/s systems at Edinburgh and Daresbury and 15 other sites in the world, including the world's largest system at Lawrence Livermore Labs. This is the greenest HPC architecture in the world and offers a route to cheap affordable petascale and exascale computing that will have profound effects on Energy, Health, Environment and Security sectors.

Boyle and IBM have 4 US patents pending resulting from the Blue Gene/Q chip set design project with IBM. Boyle was a co-author of IBM's Gauss Award winning paper at the International Supercomputing conference and has co-authored IEEE and IBM Journal papers on the Blue Gene/Q architecture with IBM.

Falle (Leeds University) partially developed the MG code on DiRAC. This has been used in the National Grid COOLTRANS project to model dispersion of CO2 from high pressure pipelines carrying CO2 for carbon sequestration.

At UCL, a virtual quantum laboratory suite has been created by the UCL spinout firm, QUANTEMOL. It has application in industry, energy, health and environmental monitoring.

Calleja (Cambridge University) is using DiRAC to work with Xyratex, the UK's leading disk manufacturer, to develop the fastest storage arrays in the world.

The COSMOS consortium (Shellard) has had a long-standing collaboration with SGI (since 1997) and with Intel (since 2003) which has allowed access to leading-edge shared-memory technologies, inlcuding the world's first UV2000 in 2012, which was also the first SMP system enabled with Intel Phi (KnightsCorner) processors. Adaptive Computing are using the COSMOS@DiRAC platform to develop a single-image version of their MOAB HPC Suite.