EPCC

EPCC

Established	1991
Research Type	High performance computing, grid computing
Director	Professor Arthur Trew
Staff	70
Location	Edinburgh, UK
Operating Agency	University of Edinburgh
Website	www.epcc.ed.ac.uk

EPCC (formerly Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre) is a supercomputing centre based at the University of Edinburgh. Since its foundation, its stated mission has been to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing throughout industry, academia and commerce.

The University has supported high-performance computing (HPC) services since 1982. As of 2010^[update], through EPCC, it now supports the UK’s national high-end computing system, HECToR.

Contents 1 Overview 2 History 3 High-performance computing facilities 4 Sample Projects 5 References 6 External links

Overview

EPCC's activities include: consultation and software development for industry and academia; research into high-performance computing; hosting advanced computing facilities and supporting their users; training and education .

The Centre supports visiting European researchers through the European Commission’s HPC-Europa programme^[1] and offers an MSc in High-Performance Computing.^[2]

EPCC is extensively involved in all aspects of Grid computing including: developing Grid middleware and architecture tools to facilitate the uptake of e-Science; developing business applications and collaborating in scientific applications and demonstration projects.

It is a member of the Globus Alliance and, through its involvement with the OGSA-DAI project, it works with the Open Grid Forum DAIS-WG. The Centre was a founder member of the UK’s National e-Science Centre (NeSC), the hub of Grid and e-Science activity in the UK. EPCC and NeSC are both partners in OMII-UK, which offers consultancy and products to the UK e-Science community. EPCC is also a founder partner of the Numerical Algorithms and Intelligent Software Centre (NAIS).

EPCC’s Director is Professor Arthur Trew and the Chair is Professor Richard Kenway.

Around half of EPCC’s annual turnover comes from collaborative projects with industry and commerce. In addition to privately-funded projects with businesses, EPCC receives funding from Scottish Enterprise, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the European Commission.

History

EPCC was established in 1990, following on from the earlier Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer Project. Since 2002, EPCC has been part of the university's School of Physics.^[3]

EPCC has hosted a variety of supercomputers over the years, including several Meiko Computing Surfaces, a Thinking Machines CM-200 Connection Machine, and a number of Cray systems including a Cray T3D and T3E.

High-performance computing facilities

As of 2010, EPCC manages a collection of HPC systems including HECToR - which includes the first production Cray XT6 24-core system in the world - and a variety of smaller HPC systems. EPCC also offers access to its experimental, award-winning 64-FPGA-based Maxwell system. These systems are all available for industry use on a pay-per-use basis. Recent systems hosted by EPCC include:

• HECToR : The current system (Phase 2b, XT6) is contained in 20 cabinets and comprises a total of 464 compute blades. Each blade contains four compute nodes, each with two 12-core AMD Opteron 2.1 GHz Magny Cours processors. This amounts to a total of 44,544 cores. Each 12-core socket is coupled with a Cray SeaStar2 routing and communications chip. This will be upgraded in late 2010 to the Cray Gemini interconnect. Each 12-core processor shares 16Gb of memory, giving a system total of 59.4 Tb. The theoretical peak performance of the phase 2b system is over 360 Tflops.
• HPCx : Launched in 2002, when it was ranked ninth-fastest system in the world. HPCx is an IBM eServer p5 575 cluster, located at Daresbury Laboratory. It presently operates under the complementarity capability computing scheme, preferably hosting workload which can not easily be accommodated on the HECToR system. EPCC supports the HPCx and HECToR systems on behalf of the UK research councils, making them available to UK academics and industry.
• Blue Gene : Launched in 2005, EPCC's Blue Gene/L was the first Blue Gene system available outside the USA. EPCC operates this 2048-compute core service for the University of Edinburgh.
• QCDOC : One of the world’s most powerful systems dedicated to the numerical investigation of quantum chromodynamics, which describes the interactions between quarks and gluons. It was developed in collaboration with a consortium of UK lattice physicists (UKQCD), Columbia University (NY), Riken Brookhaven National Laboratory and IBM.
• Maxwell : Maxwell is an innovative FPGA-based supercomputer built by the FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance (FHPCA). Maxwell comprises 32 blades housed in an IBM BladeCenter. Each blade comprises one Xeon processor and two FPGAs. The FPGAs are connected by a fast communication subsystem which enables the total of 64 FPGAs to be connected together in an 8 × 8 toroidal mesh. The processors are connected together via a PCI bus.

Sample Projects

Projects that EPCC is involved in that also have entries on Wikipedia.

• BEinGRID: Grid technology for business.
• DEISA: Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications.
• EUFORIA: EU fusion for ITER Applications (EUFORIA) is a Grid and HPC project with the aim of supporting European nuclear fusion scientists' computational simulations, enabling them to perform large and more detailed computational simulation. Specifically, it aims to enable scientists to simulate fusion plasmas at a large scale to match the larger machine, ITER, which is currently under development.
• PlanetHPC: Setting an R&D Roadmap for High Performance Computing in Europe

References

External links

• EPCC
• Projects at EPCC