These are my slides for the IDC HPC User Forum meeting at Imperial College in July 2012, introducing HPC Midlands. HPC Midlands is a cloud supercomputing service for academic and industrial use, supported by a £1m grant from the EPSRC.

1. HPC Midlands
Cloud Supercomputing for Academia and Industry
Martin Hamilton, Centre Manager − hpc-midlands.ac.uk

2. What is HPC Midlands?
 New High Performance Computing facility for
academia and industry
 Jointly operated by Loughborough University and
University of Leicester
 £1m funding from EPSRC/BIS e-Infrastructure
programme
 Building on relationships with existing industrial
partners and software providers
 Opportunity to “operationalize” HPC spending

3. Hera: The HPC Midlands Cluster
 £1m EPSRC investment + institutional contributions
 3,000 core Bull supercomputer (48 Teraflops)
 11 x chassis (18 blades per chassis)
 188 compute node blades, each with
 2 x 2.0GHz (8 core) Sandy Bridge CPUs
 15TB RAM
 140 blades with 64GB RAM (4GB/core)
 48 blades with 128GB RAM (8GB/core)
 60TB Lustre storage
 QDR Infiniband interconnect

4. The Delivery!

5. HPC Midlands Timeline
8th December e-Infrastructure call received
5th January HPC Midlands proposal submitted
19th January Funding awarded
23rd January Tender issued against RM721 framework
24th January Mechanical and Electrical work commissioned
30th January Tenders received and scored, contract awarded to Bull
9th February Work begins to prepare the HPC Midlands site
20th February Data centre extension now complete
24th February Work begins on the plumbing / chilled water supply
27th February Electrical Distribution Panel in place
1st March Space being prepared for new chiller unit
9th March 63A circuits now mostly in place
15th March Raised floor installed
21st March Dedicated chiller unit arrives and craned into place
26th March Delivery of HPC Midlands hardware

6. Mechanical and Electrical Work (FM)

7. Mechanical and Electrical Work (FM)

8. Some Assembly Required…

9. Inside a Sandy Bridge compute node

10. HPC Midlands Partners: Intel
 Cutting edge hardware innovations
 Nehalem/Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge
 Increase in cores/threads per socket, I/O bandwidth etc
 >2bn transistors per CPU!
 Many Integrated Core (MIC)
 Leading player in HPC compilers
 Intel Cluster Studio
Intel will contribute training on parallel
programming and their HPC tools

11. HPC Midlands Partners: ANSYS
 Market leading HPC software (CFX, FLUENT etc)
 But significant capital investment required for licenses
 Locks out SMEs and spinoffs
 Inflexible in today’s challenging climate
New model: “Pay As You Go” access to the ANSYS
suite of products

12. HPC Midlands Partners: E.ON
E.ON New Build and Technology, Plant Modelling
Sample use cases:
 Precipitator ductwork
 Gas turbine blade lifetime
 Gas turbine enclosure safety
 Wind farm resource assessment
 Steam flow in nuclear plants

13. HPC Midlands Partners – E.ON

14. HPC Midlands Partners – E.ON

15. HPC Midlands Partners – E.ON

16. e-Infrastructure and JANET(UK)
 JANET upgrades planned for e-Infrastructure
 £26m capital investment
 Potential for e.g. new primary connections / dedicated
bandwidth for key research centres / instruments
 What would people like from JANET?
 Can we develop a model for JANET interconnects with
industrial partners?
 JANET as _peer_ not backhaul
 Build on existing partnerships
 Move beyond Sneakernet scenario

17. And Finally… We’re Hiring!

18. HPC Midlands
Cloud Supercomputing for Academia and Industry
Martin Hamilton, Centre Manager − hpc-midlands.ac.uk