New edition of EPCC News out now

The cover of EPCC News issue 80 shows our new SGI ICE XA system which we installed and commissioned in the early summer. The system was a joint purchase between EPCC and Edinburgh Genomics, who own over 3,000 of its cores and use it to construct whole human genomes from the data produced by the University’s genome sequencing machines. EPCC owns just over 2,000 cores of the system which it runs on behalf of both organisations.

Cirrus, as we’ve named it, is the second of our dedicated HPC systems for industry. Our first, INDY, is now four years old and we are in the midst of transitioning our industry users from it to the new system. We’re sure they will find the new system much faster – in particular with regard to storage. We’ve gone to some trouble to make the transition as simple as possible with familiar compilers and job scheduling software available on the new system.

EPCC has always worked with industry and many companies have made use of the National HPC services we have operated over the past two decades including HPCx, HECToR and ARCHER. Owning our own, albeit much smaller, system gives us more flexibility to meet industry needs – there is much more memory per node and we can easily accommodate long duration jobs with small core counts. We’ll be offering time on Cirrus through the Fortissimo Marketplace which we’ve created as part of the Fortissimo Projects.

You can read more about this and a number of our other European projects in this issue. EPCC is proud to be a European HPC centre and is arguing strongly for UK universities and companies to continue to be able to access Horizon 2020 and subsequent programmes. More on this in future issues no doubt!

Mark Parsons, Director of EPCC

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