University of Warwick to spend £1.3m on Linux supercomputer

New High Performance Computing (HPC) facility will support research
By Anh Nguyen
Computerworld UK

LONDON (11/26/2010) – The University of Warwick has awarded a contract for a new Linux-based High Performance Computing (HPC) facility to OFC.

Under the £1.3 million contract, HPC solutions provider OFC will deliver the facility at the university’s Centre for Scientific Computing (CSC), where it will be mainly used for research in the field of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). MHD is the study of dynamics of electrically-conducting fluids such as plasma and metal liquids.

The facility will also be used to support research from other disciplines at the university.

The centre is looking to develop a facility that is a Linux cluster comprised of multi-core nodes interconnected at high-bandwidth and low-latency. It will also have an attached high-performance storage and parallel file system.

An existing datac entre at the research centre will house the new facility. The datacentre is equipped for up to 100KW of additional IT load and has chilled water infrastructure to accommodate water-cooled racks.

The project is expected to last 12 months from the award of contract, 21 November, with up to three contract renewals possible.