The system has been ordered

An order for the new HPC cluster has now been placed with suppliers OCF.  OCF, working in partnership with manufacturers Huawei,  will provide a cluster with:

500 TB main filestore and 20 TB filestore for home directories

Mellanox EDR (100Gbits/s) high-speed interconnect

120 compute nodes, each with two Intel Xeon E5-2699 v4 22-core processors, (5280 cores in total) of which:

• 110 ‘standard’ compute nodes each have 128 GB memory and 600 GB local storage
• 6 ‘medium memory’ nodes each have 256 GB memory and 1.2 TB local storage
• 4 ‘large memory’ nodes each have 512 GB memory and 8 TB local storage

An additional 2 ‘extra large memory’ nodes each have 1.5 TB memory and 9.6 TB local storage.  These two nodes each have four Intel Xeon E74830 v4 14-core processors (56 cores per node).

The cluster will run CentOS 7.  Job scheduling and use of the cluster resources will be managed by SLURM.

For programmers, Intel Parallel Studio XE Cluster Edition, and PGI (Portland) and GNU compilers will be provided.

The system should be commissioned by the beginning of July.

People

The HPC project team has been joined by a new member, Karen Bower, who has taken up the role of HPC research computing analyst.  Karen will be working to help shape the new system into a HPC service and to make sure that people have the tools and skills they need to use that service effectively.