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Cambridge university to upgrade Hitachi SR2201 supercomputer
London 25-05-97 The 96 node Hitachi SR2201 installed at Cambridge at the end of last year is to be upgraded to 224-nodes plus additional 16 PEs as I/O nodes, by end of July. The new configuration will provide an aggregate peak performance of 67.5 Gflops and a total main memory of 56 GBytes. The original purchase was an arrangement between Hitachi and the University of Cambridge. This HPC initiative has been deemed successful enough to attract 1.73 million pounds from the UK's government Higher Education Funding bodies for an upgrade.
There are at present some 130 users of this Hitachi machine, involving 35 projects, spread across 10 Cambridge University Departments. The departments include Applied Mathematics, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Medicine and Physics. Projects range from simulations of Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics, Atmospheric Dynamics, Combustion studies, flow dynamics in the Earth's Mantle, Quantum Monte Carlo calculations and the study of heavy Quark Systems in QCD.
The demand for HPC facilities and quality of the projects were very high so that the SR2201 machine has been running at 85% of peak capacity with downtime only for administrative reasons. The hardware proved to be totally reliable to-date. The very intensive usage experienced from the start demonstrates the usefulness of HPC.
Prof. D. Crighton, the leading light of the Cambridge High Performance Initiative, recently said: "We have always been clear about the benefits of HPCI and in working with companies who are at the leading edge of HPC technology. We are confident that our collaboration with Hitachi is highly fruitful and are enthousiastic of the exciting possibilities opening for future scientific and technological research, at Cambridge".