The University of Birmingham has taken the wraps off the second generation of its BlueBEAR supercomputer. The Linux-based cluster will be used by researchers at the UK university, as well as a wider group of computer scientists and particle physicists.
BlueBEAR II is an IBM iDataPlex system composed of about 850 Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs and a smattering of NVIDIA Quadro5000 GPUs. The server, which replaces the first generation of the server that went online in 2007, runs the Scientific Linux OS, and has a theoretical top performance of 15 teraflops.
The university is making several services available on BlueBEAR, including the general HPC services, the large memory service, the GPGPU service, and the MidPlus regional service, which provides HPC resources on other systems in the country for work that can’t be accommodated on the BEAR.
According to an InformationWeek article, BlueBEAR will also offer sophisticated visualization capabilities that incorporate “active stereo display and motion tracking” and collaborative conferencing and visualization services that will be helpful to large research groups based in different countries.
The system is part of the overall Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) project, which is a set of complementary and inter-linked services designed to meet the research needs of the institution. The system is run by the university, the supercomputer’s supplier IT services firm OCF, and other specialist partners, including IBM, Adaptive Computing, Mechdyne, and IOCOM.
Academic researchers at the University of Birmingham’s archaeology, economics, science, and engineering departments are lining up to get onto the new system. The chemistry department, for example, is planning to use BlueBEAR to perform nanoscience research. Among the projects planned are creating more cost-effective and environmentally friendly catalysts for fuel cells, according to InformationWeek.
The university will also make a portion of BlueBEAR available to GridPP, a collaboration of particle physicists and computer scientists from the UK and the CERN facility based near Geneva, Switzerland.
While BlueBEAR II has been online for just a few months, there are already upgrades in the works for the Linux-based system, including a “dedicated render farm” that will be a mixture of CPU and GPU nodes that is will be used for off-line rendering.
To widen the potential user base for BlueBEAR beyond researchers who are familiar with using a Linux-based HPC service, the university is also planning to make a Windows service available, according to the InformationWeek article.
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