Martin Hamilton, Centre Manager - hpc-midlands.ac.uk

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HPC Midlands Cloud Supercomputing for Academia
and Industry
Martin Hamilton, Centre Manager -
hpc-midlands.ac.uk
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What is HPC Midlands?

• New High Performance Computing facility for
  academia and industry
• Jointly operated by Loughborough University and
  University of Leicester
• 1m funding from EPSRC/BIS e-Infrastructure
  programme
• Building on relationships with existing
  industrial partners and software providers
• Opportunity to operationalize HPC spending

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Hera The HPC Midlands Cluster

• 1m EPSRC investment institutional
  contributions
• 3,000 core Bull supercomputer (48 Teraflops)
• 11 x chassis (18 blades per chassis)
• 188 compute node blades, each with
• 2 x 2.0GHz (8 core) Sandy Bridge CPUs
• 15TB RAM
• 140 blades with 64GB RAM (4GB/core)
• 48 blades with 128GB RAM (8GB/core)
• 60TB Lustre storage
• QDR Infiniband interconnect

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The Delivery!
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HPC Midlands Timeline

• 8th December e-Infrastructure call received
• 5th January HPC Midlands proposal submitted
• 19th January Funding awarded
• 23rd January Tender issued against RM721
  framework
• 24th January Mechanical and Electrical work
  commissioned
• 30th January Tenders received and scored,
  contract awarded to Bull
• 9th February Work begins to prepare the HPC
  Midlands site
• 20th February Data centre extension now complete
• 24th February Work begins on the plumbing /
  chilled water supply
• 27th February Electrical Distribution Panel in
  place
• 1st March Space being prepared for new chiller
  unit
• 9th March 63A circuits now mostly in place
• 15th March Raised floor installed
• 21st March Dedicated chiller unit arrives and
  craned into place
• 26th March Delivery of HPC Midlands hardware

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Mechanical and Electrical Work (FM)
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Mechanical and Electrical Work (FM)
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Some Assembly Required
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Inside a Sandy Bridge compute node
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HPC Midlands Partners Intel

• Cutting edge hardware innovations
• Nehalem/Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge
• Increase in cores/threads per socket, I/O
  bandwidth etc
• gt2bn transistors per CPU!
• Many Integrated Core (MIC)
• Leading player in HPC compilers
• Intel Cluster Studio
• Intel will contribute training on parallel
• programming and their HPC tools

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HPC Midlands Partners ANSYS

• Market leading HPC software (CFX, FLUENT etc)
• But significant capital investment required for
  licenses
• Locks out SMEs and spinoffs
• Inflexible in todays challenging climate
• New model Pay As You Go access to the ANSYS
  suite of products

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HPC Midlands Partners E.ON

• E.ON New Build and Technology, Plant Modelling
• Sample use cases
• Precipitator ductwork
• Gas turbine blade lifetime
• Gas turbine enclosure safety
• Wind farm resource assessment
• Steam flow in nuclear plants

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HPC Midlands Partners E.ON
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HPC Midlands Partners E.ON
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HPC Midlands Partners E.ON
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e-Infrastructure and JANET(UK)

• JANET upgrades planned for e-Infrastructure
• 26m capital investment
• Potential for e.g. new primary connections /
  dedicated bandwidth for key research centres /
  instruments
• What would people like from JANET?
• Can we develop a model for JANET interconnects
  with industrial partners?
• JANET as _peer_ not backhaul
• Build on existing partnerships
• Move beyond Sneakernet scenario

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And Finally Were Hiring!
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HPC Midlands Cloud Supercomputing for Academia
and Industry
Martin Hamilton, Centre Manager -
hpc-midlands.ac.uk