| Active | October 2007– |
|---|---|
| Sponsors | EPSRC, NERC and BBSRC |
| Operators | Partners including EPCC, STFC and NAG) |
| Location | University of Edinburgh, Scotland |
| Architecture | Hybrid Cray XT4 / Cray XE6, 44,544 cores, Cray Linux Environment |
| Memory | 45.3 terabytes |
| Storage | 934 TB |
| Speed | 360 teraflops |
| Purpose | UK academic community use |
| Web site | http://www.hector.ac.uk/ |
HECToR (High End Computing Terascale Resources) is a British academic national supercomputer service funded by EPSRC, NERC and BBSRC for the UK academic community. The HECToR service is run by partners including EPCC, STFC and Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG).[1]
The supercomputer itself (currently a Cray XE6) is located at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The first phase came online in October 2007, and as of 2010[update] is at 'phase 2b' with a peak performance of over 360 teraflops. A third phase is planned for 2011.
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HECToR's hardware configuration has been progressively upgraded since the system was first commissioned.
HECToR's initial configuration, known as Phase 1, featured 60 Cray XT4 cabinets containing 1416 compute blades, giving a total of 11,328 2.8 GHz AMD Opteron processor cores, connected to 576 terabytes of RAID backing storage, later increased to 934 TB. The peak performance of the system was 59 teraflops.[2]
In August 2008, 28 Cray X2 Black Widow vector compute nodes were addded to the system. Each node had 4 vector processors, giving a total of 112 processors. Each processor was capable of 25.6 gigaflops, giving a peak performance of 2.87 teraflops. Each 4-processor node shared 32 gigabytes of memory.[2]
In the summer of 2009, the XT4 cabinets were upgraded with quad-core 2.3 GHz Opteron processors with 8 GB memory each. This doubled the number of processor cores to 22,656, and increased total system memory to 45.3 terabytes. Peak performance was increased to 208 teraflops.[3]
The Phase 2b upgrade, performed in 2010, involved installation of a new 20-cabinet Cray XT6 system featuring 12-core Opteron 6100 processors, giving a total of 44,544 cores and a peak performance of over 360 teraflops. At the same time the existing XT4 system was reduced to approximately half its original size. A further upgrade took place later in 2010 to replace the SeaStar2 interconnect with a new interconnect technology, codenamed Gemini.[4]
HECToR's operating system is Cray Linux Environment (CLE), formerly known as UNICOS/lc. A variety of applications, compilers and utilities are available to users.
HECToR supports four compiler suites:
Compilation for the HECToR backend nodes is facilitated through the Cray compilation scripts: ftn, cc, and CC.