UK Universities to Share 250 Teraflops Cray XT5h Supercomputer

Published: January 22, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Supercomputer maker Cray has sold a 63 teraflops XT4 massively parallel Linux supercomputer to a consortium of universities in the United Kingdom centered around a supercomputing center at the University of Edinburgh. The machine is the first phase of a supercomputing project called Hector, short for High-End Computing Terascale Resource, that will eventually see the system upgraded to 250 teraflops and beyond.

The first phase of the Hector deployment is a current-generation, Opteron-based XT4 machine, which is a kicker to the "Red Storm" design that Cray did for Sandia National Laboratory several years ago and paid for by the U.S. Department of Energy. The Hector system is being funded by the United Kingdom's Research Councils, which is a rough analog to the National Science Foundation here in the States. Cray was selected by the University of Edinburgh through a competitive bidding process, but the university did not divulge what other iron and vendors were involved in the bidding; the price tag for the overall Hector project was reportedly $221 million, which makes it a very big deal, indeed. Cray is obviously quite happy about that.

In 2008, the Hector system will be upgraded with a Cray X2 system, which is a kicker to the existing X1 vector supercomputer put into a blade form factor. Last fall, Cray announced the Cray XT5 upgrade to the Red Storm designs, and the XT5h, which adds X2-style vector blades to the mix. Both the XT5 and XT5h are based on improved SeaStar-2+ interconnection networks. (See Cray Revamps Supercomputers with XT5 Designs for details on the Cray designs.) The university will in fact be the first customer to take delivery of the XT5h machinery, which will be upgraded in October 2009 to hit 250 teraflops. The contract with Cray calls for the machine to have a third upgrade beyond that in 2011, but the specific teraflops were not divulged, since it is hard to call what Opteron and vector processor technologies will be current there.

Hector runs Linux, of course, and probably a smattering of Unix on the vector blades (Cray did not say), and is installed at the University of Edinburgh's Advanced Computing Facility. The machine will run applications in materials simulation, computational chemistry, disaster simulation and emergency response, biomolecular science, and engineering modeling, and will be used by universities throughout the United Kingdom who need access to large amounts of computing capacity. Hector will be the most powerful supercomputer in the United Kingdom--at least among the machines that are made public, and until someone else (like IBM) tries to score a big deal just for bragging rights and the cash.

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