UK Creates Massive 200,000-Core ‘HPC Service’

By Tiffany Trader

February 7, 2013

The United Kingdom is rapidly ramping up its HPC capabilities. The nation just launched its third HPC service in the last 12 months, a 200,000-core powerhouse designed to accommodate a wide range of academic and industry workloads.

“Accelerator,” as it’s known, was formed by taking the UK national high performance computing service HECToR, a Cray XE6 platform, and augmenting it with two new machines: an IBM BlueGene/Q and an AMD dual configuration Linux-Windows cluster, nicknamed “Indy,” for its industry-affiliation.

With no fancy middleware or interconnects to bridge them, Accelerator is essentially just three separate machines housed under one roof at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC). By combining the resources, they can claim, as the press material states, “the largest on-demand supercomputing resource in Europe.”

Accelerator does indeed surpass the capabilities of other UK services like the OCF’s enCORE service (8,000 cores) and the CORE HPC Service, managed by the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London (22,000 cores).

George Graham, Business Development Manager for EPCC, highlights the specifications of the Accelerator machines: HECToR, the prototype for the service, is a Cray machine with 90,112 cores and a peak output of 827 teraflops. The slightly more-equipped BlueGene/Q sports 98,304 cores and boasts a peak performance of 1.26 petaflops. Indy, in comparison, is a small cluster by today’s standards, with 1,576 cores, but, as Graham emphasizes, its main affinity is not peak performance, but openness and ease-of-use.

Indy supports standard installations of Linux and Windows, which allows it to accommodate a wide variety of industry workloads. In contrast, the Cray and IBM supers are more specialized; they require non-standard Linux distros in order to leverage the proprietary system interconnects.

The majority of Accelerator’s funding comes from EPSRC, a UK government agency, but the Indy cluster was financed out of the Edinburgh University budget and supplied by a local HPC provider, Viglen.

All three machines along with petabyte scale data storage are housed inside EPCC’s purpose-built Advanced Compute Facility. The large site has been active for many years, notes Graham, but has undergone continuous renovations to accommodate HECToR and meet the university’s growing computational demands.

The HPC service can cater to nearly every kind of research: life and earth sciences, pharmaceuticals, energy, and all manner of engineering and product development workloads.

“There is no limit to the application domain capability of our service machines,” says Graham. But he adds that ideal use cases of each system do vary.

As best-in-class leadership supercomputing systems, HECToR and BlueGene are targeted at very high-scale, high-resolution simulation and modeling challenges, for example whole nuclear reactor simulations rather than just one rod.

The ability to perform complete system simulations is a truly defining breakthrough, speaking both to how far we’ve come and the awesome potential that lies ahead. “This is the path to exascale,” observes Graham.

Indy is targeted at slightly more constrained challenges – CFD and FEA are common workloads – but nevertheless it’s a type of solution that can be a transformative digital tool for small-to-medium sized enterprises.

Next >>

The machines can be accessed from around the globe using an Internet connection, but it’s not a cloud in the usual sense, says Graham. He describes the setup as very simple remote access, albeit over secure-connection SSH.

“Users have batch-based queueing access for jobs, however we wrap that with user authentication, security and privacy,” he says. “So it provides for a very healthy service.”

Asked if the machines could be configured in such a way that it would be possible to harness all 200,000-cores, Graham considers the idea before responding. “That’s not there now,” he says, “but it’s not unreasonable to think that our research could enable that kind of setup.”

“At EPCC we undertake a lot of research work,” he continues, “and some of it is in the domain of grid and cloud computing, so it’s not unfeasible to think that we would apply some of the lessons learned in order to provide mechanisms through which our independent architecture can be accessed via a holistic service.”

When it comes to data transfer constraints – a common roadblock to remote computing – Graham notes this is not generally an issue on the input side; the challenge is dealing with the large data files that are generated by the compute. However, he is quick to point out several solutions:

The first is that our systems are at an advanced compute facility that is connected to the UK-wide Super-JANET Network which has high data transfer performance across all UK higher education establishments. Any user that can get to a local campus can benefit from the very high data transfer.

Second, we remove the need for users to pull back the large amount of data that has been generated. What we can offer them is via a facility of on-demand serial queues, or working from login nodes, the ability to do post-processing of the data while the data is in-situ on our systems. So they can do post-processing, visualization, and so on while the data is on our system, which drastically reduce the need for data transfer.

And third, we are talking batch-based, queue-based technology and large data storage; we can always ship the data, load it onto a secure portable disk and courier it between us and the user establishment.

Although the expanded service is new, HECToR has been up and running for five years now. It has quite a wide community of users as it meets the needs of UK and European researchers and also satisfies a body of industry users. From a commercial business-development point of view, Graham notes their resources are predominately focused on UK, but they have had users from the States and across continental Europe. There really are no geographical barriers since the service can be accessed over a standard Internet connection.

It’s apparent from the heightened level of activity over the last few years that the UK government has a real objective in driving HPC to improve UK competitiveness, and these types of public-private collaborations are part of their strategy. They’re investing millions of pounds and they expect to see a return on investment in terms of innovation as well as real economic stimulus. As industry users pay to rent time on these big systems they are in effect underwriting the cost of the systems. That’s true, says Graham, but he returns to the collaborative nature of the arrangement: “Think of it as a three-way partnership between government and industry and the higher-education establishments,” he says.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire