Ness is a parallel machine that is used to support local projects such as the MSc in HPC, our European visitor scheme and general research activities. Ness is supplied by Sun, and based on AMD Opteron processors running Linux.
Ness has a shared-memory architecture which allows users the option of running large threaded jobs (eg OpenMP) as well as message-passing jobs. The system has two back-end X4600 SMP nodes, both containing 16 processor-cores; there is 2GB of memory per core.
Ness has basically the same combination of processor technology, operating system and compiler suite as the new HECToR national supercomputer and is thus a useful system for us easily to investigate portability and performance of HECToR applications (if not scalability).