A new supercomputer, operated by the EPCC at the University of Edinburgh, will provide services to accelerate product development for business users. This new supercomputer will be used to dramatically reduce the time taken for businesses to bring new products to market – providing a competitive advantage for business users.

Users will be able to run their own codes as well as accessing a range of commercial software tools on an on-demand, pay-per-use basis to solve CFD and FEA simulation and modelling problems in sectors such as automotive, aerospace, energy, oil and gas, general engineering, life sciences and financial services. Potential applications could include helping to create efficient engineering devices, solving complex genetic calculations, or optimising the design of buildings.

Access to the supercomputer called Cirrus, is provided by EPCC, one of the UK’s leading supercomputing centres, based at the University of Edinburgh. The system is a state-of-the art SGI ICE XA cluster with 56 compute nodes and utilizing superfast Infiniband interconnect. There are 36 cores per node providing 2016 cores in total. Hyperthreading is enabled on each node providing a total of 72 threads per node. Each node has 256GB RAM. Three login nodes, with identical hardware to the compute nodes, are provided for general use. Local Lustre storage is provided by a single Lustre filesystem with 200TB of disk space and users will have access to EPCC’s considerable data storage and archiving services.

Also, Clients will be able to use the £1 million machine to tackle their research and design challenges. The service is fully supported, and clients will also have access to EPCC’s consulting expertise in HPC and data analytics.

This new service will facilitate businesses to perform complex simulations involving calculations that would be impossible, or much slower when carried out on conventional desktop computing systems. Delivering results in hours to days instead of weeks or months. The system is housed at the University’s Advanced Computing Facility at Easter Bush, which also hosts the UK National supercomputing service, called ARCHER.

Time on Cirrus will be charged at Time on Cirrus is charged at £0.0369 per core hour (exclusive of VAT). Furthermore, to celebrate the launch of Cirrus, EPCC is offering free time (1000 core hours) and support to the first 20 companies that apply to use the system through this link.

More information on the Cirrus System
Detailed overview of Cirrus hardware
Cirrus User Documentation