HECToR

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HECToR (High End Computing Terascale Resources) is a UK academic national supercomputer service procured by EPSRC on behalf of the UK academic community. The HECToR service is run by a consortium including EPCC, STFC and Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG).[1]

The supercomputer itself (a Cray XT4) is located at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The first phase came online in October, 2007, and as of 2009 has a peak performance of around 208 teraflops. A further upgrade phase is scheduled for 2010 and the third phase is planned for 2011.

Hardware

HECToR's hardware configuration has been progressively upgraded since the system was first commissioned.

Phase 1

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 has 4 vector processors, giving a total of 112 processors. Each processor is capable of 25.6 gigaflops, giving a peak performance of 2.87 teraflops. Each 4-processor node shares 32 gigabytes of memory.[2]

Phase 2a

In the summer of 2009, the XT4 cabinets were upgraded with quad-core 2.3GHz 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]

Phase 2b

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 around 340 teraflops. At the same time the existing XT4 system was reduced to approximately half its original size. A further upgrade is anticipated later in 2010 to replace the SeaStar2 interconnect with a new interconnect technology, codenamed Gemini.[4]

Software

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.

Compilers

HECToR supports four compiler suites:

  • PGI compilers (v7.1-4) - pgf90, pgf77, pgcc, pgCC.
  • Pathscale compilers (v3.1) - pathf90, pathcc, pathCC.
  • GNU compilers (v4.2.3) - gfortran, gcc.
  • Cray compilers.

Compilation for the HECToR backend nodes is facilitated through the Cray compilation scripts: ftn, cc, and CC.

References

  1. ^ Inside the UK's fastest machine, James Randerson, Guardian, Wed 2 Jan 2008
  2. ^ a b "HECToR Phase 1 Hardware Configuration". www.hector.ac.uk. UoE HPCX Ltd. Retrieved 7 May 2010.
  3. ^ "HECToR Hardware". www.hector.ac.uk. UoE HPCX Ltd. Retrieved 7 May 2010.
  4. ^ "HECToR Phase2B Upgrade". HECToRNews (7). UoE HPCX Ltd. December 2009.
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