Back to Contents Page

Resources Available

Last modified: 2/5/2017

Quick Links

• Phase-1 Computer Systems - now all de-commissioned
• Phase-2 Computer Systems
• Scafell Pike
• Jade
• Big Data Systems
• Energy Efficient Computing Systems
• Power-8 Computing Systems
• Room Names
• Visualisation Suite
• Training Suite

STFC's Scientific Computing Department has over thirty years' experience in the design, implementation and development of world leading scientific software. It is internationally recognised as a centre for parallelisation, optimisation and porting of existing software to leading edge and novel architecture systems. In addition to domain expertise in a wide range of disciplines the Department also has strong software engineering and numerical algorithms expertise.

Following recent capital investments from UK government the Department has established the Hartree Centre in collaboration with IBM. This outward facing centre offers a range of services including collaborative software development and access to a range of novel hardware platforms (98,304 core Blue Gene/Q, Blue Gene Active Storage, iDataPlex, NextScale, ARM, nVidia Tesla GPU, Intel Phi and Maxeler MPX-X).

For access to the Hartree Centre machines and support in your research projects, please contact: David Holder, Head of Programme Support Office, The Hartree Centre, STFC Daresbury Laboratory, WA4 4AD: e-mail: david.holder@stfc.ac.uk; tel: 01925 603120.

For current status and system information see [Status Page|http://community.hartree.stfc.ac.uk/wiki/site/admin/status.html] .

Summary of system compute nodes:

Phase-1 Computer Systems

The Hartree Centre has a heterogeneous collection of computational, storage, and networking resources. Each resource is designed to fulfill a specific requirement in the field of high performance and scientific computing, and using the right resources for each task is an essential part of getting the most out of any project.

Procurement in early 2012 included refurbishment of the existing HPCx computer room at Daresbury Laboratory. It is now split into two to form a state-of-the art data centre, half with water cooling, and half with conventional air cooling.

Phase-1 computer systems were Invicta (aka Blue Wonder), Bantam and Bifort (aka Blue Joule). These have now been de-commssioned to make way for more efficient and highly performing architectures.

Phase-2 Computer Systems

There is a Flash time-lapse video showing the installation during March 2014 here: http://avon.dl.ac.uk/hartree/phase2_installation.flv .

The login cluster for Iden and Napier is named Calcott.

Iden - iDataPlex and Xeon Phi Cluster (Blue Wonder Phase-2)

• 84 nodes, each node has 2 x12 core Intel Xeon processors (Ivy Bridge E5-2697v2 2.7GHz) and 64GB RAM. A total of 2,016 cores.
• Interconnect is Infiniband from Mellanox (FDR Connect-IB 56 GB/s).
• 42 of 84 have accelerators – an Intel Phi 5110P.

Napier - NextScale Cluster (Blue Wonder Phase-2)

• 360 nodes, each node has 2 x12 core Intel Xeon processors (Ivy Bridge E5-2697v2 2.7GHz) and 64GB RAM. Total of 8,640 cores.
• Interconnect is Infiniband from Mellanox (FDR Connect-IB 56 GB/s).

Scafell Pike

This was installed in the HDR. It included 22 racks and 80+ pallets of equipment with water and electrical hook ups. The Impact & Engagement team are arranging time lapse footage of the installation for sharing at a future date.

Jade

The Joint Academic Data Science Endeavour (JADE), an NVIDIA DGX-1 system owned by the University of Oxford and run as part of a Tier-2, EPSRC-funded consortium has been installed at the Hartree Centre. We will host and support the system in partnership with Atos, who are providing the hardware. JADE will be the largest GPU facility in the UK supporting world-leading research in machine learning.

Big Data Systems

Dawson - X86 Cluster for Data Analytics

We have a wide range of Big Data software, for more information contact the business development team.

See separate page on Big Data.

Energy Efficient Computing Research Systems

Note, there is a separate area describing systems related to our Energy Efficient Computing Research Programme and the projects running on them: http://community.hartree.stfc.ac.uk/portal/site/eecrp .

Iden - Xeon Phi Cluster

See above.

Neale - Novel Cooling Technology

This is a novel cooling demonstrator from Insight and ClusterVision:

• 120 nodes, each node is 2 x8 core Intel Xeon (Ivy Bridge E5-2650v2. 2.6GHz), 64GB RAM, a total of 1,920 Cores.
• Interconnect of QLogic (QDR80) - verbs and dapl interface.
• 216TB of FhGFS Parallel Storage.
• Green Revolution Cooling (oil bath).

DeLorean - Data Flow Technologies

This is an FPGA system from Viglen and Maxeler.

• Five Maxeler MPC-X2000 nodes (containing in total 40 Maia dataflow engines)
• Six SuperMicro CPU nodes, to run software parts of applications, with dual Intel (Sandy Bridge E5-2650v2. 2.6GHz) CPUs and 128GB of memory.
• Panasas Activestor14 PanFS storage solution with 112TiB usable storage capacity

Ace - Low Power Processors

This is an Arm-v8 based system from Misco, OCF, IBM and ARM.

• 1,152 ARMv8 64 bit cores (96 cores per server)
• 12x ARM processor motherboards configured in an IBM NeXtScale chassis. These boards are being developed by Lenovo.

For more information on these systems go to Energy Efficient Computing Systems .

Power-8 Research Systems

Login via Fairthorpe

Panther

• 32 x 16 core Power8 @3.86 Ghz (128 threads per node)
• 4 x nVidia K80 GPUs per node
• 2 x 1 TB HDD per node
• 28 nodes have 512 GB RAM; 4 have 1 TB RAM
• 2 x IBM ESS GS4 storage arrays providing 96 x800 GB SSD. 1B (FDR) attached
• 1 x IBM FlashStorage 900 IB (QDR) attached. 57 TB usable
• 1 x IBM FlashStorage 900 IB (CAPI) attached to single host. 57 TB usable

Paragon

• IBM Power-8 cluster with NVLink targetting Hartree Centre IROR work load.
• 40 x 16 core nodes @ 4.0GHz. 2 x nVidia GPU per node. 2 x 1TB HDD and 1 x 3.2TB NVMe card per node. 35 nodes have 512GB RAM; 5 have 1TB RAM.
• 1 x E850-44E Large–Memory node with 4TB RAM 32 cores @4.2 GHz. 2 x 280GB HDD
• 2 x IBM ESS GS4 storage arrays, with a total of 192 800GB SSDs. Inifiniband (EDR) attached.
• 1 x IBM ESS GS2 storage expansion, with a total of 96 400GB SSDs. Inifiniband (EDR) attached.
• Dual Infiniband EDR fabric

Room Names

How to find your way around The Hartree Centre and how many people the rooms can accommodate:

If you would like to organise an event at the Hartree Centre such as a workshop, training course or tour then please see http://www.hartree.stfc.ac.uk/Hartree/Training+and+skills/45515.aspx where there is a link to an Event Proposal Form. Visualisation suites and Brunner-Mond can also be booked via this form or you can send an email to the Hartree Centre Service Desk at hartree@stfc.ac.uk.

A list of events can be seen on the STFC Events Booking page at: https://eventbooking.stfc.ac.uk/news-events/

Visualisation Suite

The visualisation suite comprises two parts: the Surround Wall (or Curved Wall) in the Leverhulme room; and the Quad Wall in the Crosfield room, which is adjacent to the training suite. These facilities support full 3D active stereo and a wide range of visual applications.

For more information, see here: http://tyne.dl.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/Visualisation/WebHome .

Training Suite

The training suite in the Brunner-Mond room consists of several rows of desks with a total of around 50 workstations. There are two presenters' areas with separate workstations and projectors onto wall mounted screens. This is primarily designed as an area for hands-on computer based training. There are separate facilities for seminars, lectures and workshops.

For more information, see here: http://community.hartree.stfc.ac.uk/library/content/gateway/training.html .

Back to Contents Page