Supercomputers go live

Issue 50

7 - 20 October 1997

Staff Newspaper of Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine

Supercomputers go live

Professor John Darlington (left) and Dr Wing To in front of the new computer.

The high performance Fujitsu parallel computers recently installed at Imperial are now live and ready for use by research groups all around the College.

The Fujitsu AP3000 and VX 'supercomputers' have been funded by a partnership between Fujitsu, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Higher Education Funding Council and the Office of Science and Technology, following Imperial's success in last year's Joint Research Equipment Initiative.

The College received £1.65 million, the largest award presented under the scheme. This was backed by a significant donation from Fujitsu, continuing a fruitful collaboration with Imperial which started three years ago with the creation of the IC/Fujitsu Parallel Computing Research Centre.

"We very much look forward to working with groups, not only in the traditional science and engineering high performance computing areas, but also in newer areas such as medicine or finance where this technology obviously has great promise," said Professor John Darlington, the Centre's director, who hopes that Imperial researchers will take maximum advantage of the new facility.

"The configuration installed is both powerful and modern and flexible enough to support work in a variety of areas," he said. "Taken together, the two machines provide a considerable resource with vector and scalar parallel processing capability, large memory capacity and computational power," Professor Darlington explained. "Furthermore the machines are extensible and designed to be able to take advantage of future developments in microprocessor and network technology, so we hope that the investment already made will reap dividends well into the future."

Projects already planned for the supercomputers include the detailed study of arterial disease and breast cancer detection; geophysical research into the forces responsible for earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and modelling the mechanisms underlying

photosynthesis.

The new campus-wide service will be based on a Fujitsu AP3000 parallel computer, currently with 16 processors but soon to be extended to 80, which will be linked to a Fujitsu VX vector system, providing a heterogeneous computational resource amongst the most powerful in the UK. The systems will provide a theoretical aggregate peak performance of nearly 50 Gflops with 15 Gbytes of memory and more than 400 Gbytes of high speed disc storage.

The AP3000 range, Fujitsu's third generation of high performance parallel server systems, is built from the latest UltraSPARC processors from Sun which are integrated within Fujitsu's high speed internal network.

Fujitsu also founded a lectureship in parallel computing at Imperial, a post currently held by Dr Yi-ke Guo, who acts as technical director of the Centre.

Anyone wishing to make use of the new facility or wanting to attend the workshop on 11 November is invited to contact Dr Wing To, the Centre's coordinator, at hwt@doc.ic.ac.uk Information is also available at the Centre's web site: http://icpc.doc.ic.ac.uk