Edinburgh University invests in high performance computing

Researchers at Edinburgh University's shared High Performance Computer System (HPC system), known as ‘Eddie’, have just upgraded their system to power much more ambitious scientific research – and save budget, too.

“This is not just a much more powerful machine for us, it's so much more powerful that it's going to save the University money as other groups will not expand their systems and start using ours,” Jean Richie, Edinburgh compute data facility service director, University of Edinburgh, told PublicTechnology.net.

Scientists studying problems in such areas including bioinformatics, speech processing, particle physics, material physics, chemistry, cosmology, medical imaging and psychiatry are all expected to use the system.

The new array not just immediately doubles the compute power available to researchers but will be much greener than its predecessor as it generate less heat and consumes much less energy: Edinburgh is using low cost water-cooling technology as part of the set-up in the first UK deployment from IBM using its iDataPlex servers running Intel's E5620 Quad Core Westmere processors.

iDataplex water-cooling features are said to be able to take away 100% of heat generated by the system close to the source, plus the Uni is using what's called 'air-side cooling' – opening up its data centre to ambient cool Scottish air to all-in-all give the system virtually cost-free cooling for much of the year.

The system was designed and installed by specialist supplier OCF, which has also implemented another supercomputer at the University of Southampton.