1. HPC Midlands
Bull User Group for eXtreme Computing, 2012
Martin Hamilton, Centre Manager
@martin_hamilton hpc-midlands.ac.uk

2. Tildesley Report – see http://goo.gl/qw2DW

3. e-Infrastructure funding – http://goo.gl/SKgdG

4. What is HPC Midlands?
 New High Performance Computing facility for
academia and industry
 Jointly operated by Loughborough University and
University of Leicester
 £1m funding from EPSRC/BIS e-Infrastructure
programme
 Building on relationships with existing industrial
partners and software providers
 Opportunity to “operationalize” HPC spending

5. About Loughborough
University

6. Number One for
Student Experience

7. “Research That Matters”

8. Hera: The HPC Midlands Cluster
• £1m EPSRC investment + institutional contributions
• 3,000 core Bull supercomputer (48 Teraflops)
• 11 x chassis (18 blades per chassis)
• 188 compute node blades, each with
– 2 x 2.0GHz (8 core) Sandy Bridge CPUs
• 15TB RAM
– 140 blades with 64GB RAM (4GB/core)
– 48 blades with 128GB RAM (8GB/core)
• 60TB Lustre storage
• QDR Infiniband interconnect

9. The Delivery!

10. HPC Midlands Timeline
8th December e-Infrastructure call received
5th January HPC Midlands proposal submitted
19th January Funding awarded
23rd January Tender issued against RM721 framework
24th January Mechanical and Electrical work commissioned
30th January Tenders received and scored, contract awarded to Bull
9th February Work begins to prepare the HPC Midlands site
24th February Work begins on the plumbing / chilled water supply
1st March Space being prepared for new chiller unit
9th March 63A circuits now mostly in place
15th March Raised floor installed
21st March Dedicated chiller unit arrives and craned into place
26th March Delivery of HPC Midlands hardware

11. Mechanical and Electrical Work (FM)

12. Mechanical and Electrical Work (FM)

13. Some Assembly Required…

14. Inside a Sandy Bridge compute node

15. HPC Midlands Partners: Intel
• Cutting edge hardware innovations
 Nehalem/Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge
 Increase in cores/threads per socket, I/O bandwidth etc
 >2bn transistors per CPU!
 Many Integrated Core (MIC)
 Leading player in HPC compilers
 Intel Cluster Studio
Intel will contribute training on parallel
programming and their HPC tools

16. HPC Midlands Partners: ANSYS
Market leading HPC software (CFX, FLUENT etc)
But significant capital investment required for licenses
 Locks out SMEs and spinoffs
 Inflexible in today’s challenging climate
New model: “Pay As You Go” access to the ANSYS suite
of products

17. HPC Midlands Partners: E.ON
E.ON New Build and Technology, Software & Modelling
Sample use cases:
 Precipitator ductwork
 Gas turbine blade lifetime
 Gas turbine enclosure safety
 Wind farm resource assessment
 Steam flow in power plants

18. HPC Midlands Partners – E.ON

19. HPC Midlands Partners – E.ON

20. HPC Midlands Partners – E.ON

21. e-Infrastructure and JANET(UK)
• JANET upgrades planned for e-Infrastructure
 £26m capital investment
 Potential for e.g. new primary connections / dedicated
bandwidth for key research centres / instruments
 What would people like from JANET?
 Can we develop a model for JANET interconnects with
industrial partners?
 JANET as _peer_ not backhaul
 Build on existing partnerships
 Move beyond Sneakernet scenario

22. HPC Midlands
Bull User Group for eXtreme Computing, 2012
Martin Hamilton, Centre Manager
@martin_hamilton hpc-midlands.ac.uk