The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) is the national

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a mult ...

centre in

Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...

. It was established in 2005 and provides supercomputing resources, support, training and related services. ICHEC is involved in education and training, including providing courses for researchers.

Kay supercomputer

ICHEC's newest supercomputer, Kay, was commissioned in August 2018 and was named after Irish-American

ENIAC ENIAC (; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. There were other computers that had these features, but the ENIAC had all of them in one pac ...

programmer

Kathleen Antonelli Kathleen Rita Antonelli ( McNulty; formerly Mauchly; 12 February 1921 – 20 April 2006), known as Kay McNulty, was an Irish-born American computer programmer and one of the six original programmers of the ENIAC, one of the first general-purp ...

following a public poll, in which the other shortlist candidates were botanist

Ellen Hutchins Ellen Hutchins (1785–1815) was an early Irish botanist. She specialised in seaweeds, lichens, mosses and liverworts. She is known for finding many plants new to science, identifying hundreds of species, and for her botanical illustrations in ...

, scientist and inventor

Nicholas Callan Father Nicholas Joseph Callan (22 December 1799 – 10 January 1864) was an Irish priest and scientist from Darver, County Louth, Ireland. He was Professor of Natural Philosophy in Maynooth College in County Kildare from 1834, and is best known ...

, geologist

Richard Kirwan Richard Kirwan, LL.D, FRS, FRSE MRIA (1 August 1733 – 22 June 1812) was an Irish geologist and chemist. He was one of the last supporters of the theory of phlogiston. Kirwan was active in the fields of chemistry, meteorology, and geol ...

, chemist

Eva Philbin Eva Philbin (4 January 1914 – 24 June 2005) was an Irish chemist who became the first woman president of the Institute of Chemistry of Ireland. Born Eva Maria Ryder in Ballina, County Mayo, Ireland, Philbin received her B.Sc with first class h ...

, and hydrographer Francis Beaufort. Kay's system is composed of: * A cluster of 336 nodes, each node having 2x 20-core 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon Gold 6148 ( Skylake) processors, 192 GiB of RAM, a 400 GiB local SSD for scratch space and a 100Gbit OmniPath network adaptor. This partition has a total of 13,440 cores and 63 TiB of distributed memory. * A

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

partition of 16 nodes with the same specification as above, plus 2x

Nvidia Tesla Nvidia Tesla was the name of Nvidia's line of products targeted at stream processing or general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU), named after pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. Its products began using GPUs from the G80 seri ...

V100 16GB PCIe ( Volta architecture) GPUs on each node. Each GPU has 5,120 CUDA cores and 640 Tensor Cores. * A "Phi" partition of 16 nodes, each containing 1x self-hosted Intel

Xeon Phi Xeon Phi was a series of x86 manycore processors designed and made by Intel. It was intended for use in supercomputers, servers, and high-end workstations. Its architecture allowed use of standard programming languages and application program ...

Processor 7210 ( Knights Landing or KNL architecture) with 64 cores @ 1.3 GHz, 192 GiB RAM and a 400 GiB local SSD for scratch space. * A "high memory" set of 6 nodes each containing 1.5 TiB of RAM, 2x 20-core 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon Gold 6148 (Skylake) processors and 1 TiB of dedicated local SSD for scratch storage. * A set of service and administrative nodes to provide user login, batch scheduling, management, networking, etc. Storage is provided via Lustre filesystems on a high-performance DDN SFA14k system with 1 PiB of capacity. Like all previous HPC systems, ICHEC is connected to the

HEAnet HEAnet is the national education and research network of Ireland. HEAnet's e-infrastructure services support approximately 210,000 students and staff (third-level) in Ireland, and approximately 800,000 students and staff (first and second-lev ...

and

GÉANT GÉANT is the pan-European data network for the research and education community. It interconnects national research and education networks (NRENs) across Europe, enabling collaboration on projects ranging from biological science, to earth obse ...

networks.

Fionn supercomputer

Between 2014 and August 2018, ICHEC managed the Fionn supercomputer, a heterogeneous system composed of: * an

SGI SGI may refer to: Companies *Saskatchewan Government Insurance *Scientific Games International, a gambling company *Silicon Graphics, Inc., a former manufacturer of high-performance computing products *Silicon Graphics International, formerly Rac ...

ICE X cluster with 320 nodes or 7,680

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

Ivy Bridge processor cores with a combined 20 TB of memory (24 cores and 64 GB memory per node). * a hybrid partition with 32 nodes. Each node has 20

Ivy Bridge processor cores, 64 GB of memory along with many-core hardware from

(2x

5110P coprocessors on 16 nodes) and

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

(2x Tesla K20X

GPGPU General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditiona ...

cards on 16 nodes). * a shared memory compute node (14 internal

NUMA Nuclear mitotic apparatus protein 1 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the ''NUMA1'' gene. Interactions Nuclear mitotic apparatus protein 1 has been shown to interact with PIM1, Band 4.1, GPSM2 G-protein-signaling modulator 2, also call ...

nodes) with 112

Sandy Bridge Sandy Bridge is the codename for Intel's 32 nm microarchitecture used in the second generation of the Intel Core processors (Core i7, i5, i3). The Sandy Bridge microarchitecture is the successor to Nehalem and Westmere microarchitecture. ...

processor cores, 2

5110P coprocessors and 1.7 TB of memory. * a set of service and administrative nodes to provide user login, batch scheduling, management, tape backup, switches, etc. Storage is provided via
DDN
SFA12k-20 platform with 560 TB of capacity to all components of the machine via a Lustre filesystem. Fionn was connected to

's networking infrastructure. Irish researchers were able to apply for access to Fionn via several schemes. A helpdesk was available for user support. Fionn was replaced by Kay in August 2018.Fionn
/ref>

Other ICHEC functions

ICHEC was designated a

CUDA CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ...

Research Center in 2010List of Nvidia CUDA Research Centers, retrieved 19 September 2014
/ref> Its work in this area has included the porting to CUDA of the

Quantum ESPRESSO Quantum ESPRESSO is a suite for first-principles electronic-structure calculations and materials modeling, distributed for free and as free software under the GNU General Public License. It is based on density-functional theory, plane wave basis ...

and DL_POLY

molecular dynamics Molecular dynamics (MD) is a computer simulation method for analyzing the physical movements of atoms and molecules. The atoms and molecules are allowed to interact for a fixed period of time, giving a view of the dynamic "evolution" of t ...

packages as well as various industrial benchmarking studies. ICHEC became an

Parallel Computing Center (IPCC) in 2014List of Intel Parallel Computing Centers, retrieved 19 September 2014
/ref> to conduct research on many-core technology in high performance computing and big data analytics. In collaboration with

Met Éireann Met Éireann (; meaning " Met of Ireland") is the state meteorological service of Ireland, part of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. History The history of modern meteorology in Ireland dates back to 8 October 1860, whe ...

, ICHEC provides hardware and support to publish climate and weather forecast models. ICHEC computational scientists also take an active part in the ongoing development of the models and conduct related climate/environmental research. ICHEC works with a number of

Irish government The Government of Ireland ( ga, Rialtas na hÉireann) is the cabinet that exercises executive authority in Ireland. The Constitution of Ireland vests executive authority in a government which is headed by the , the head of government. The gover ...

departments and agencies (e.g.

Enterprise Ireland Enterprise Ireland is an Irish state economic development agency focused on helping Irish-owned business deliver new export sales. The aim of Enterprise Ireland is . History Enterprise Ireland was established by the Industrial Development (E ...

IDA Ireland Industrial Development Agency (IDA Ireland) ( ga, An Ghníomhaireacht Forbartha Tionscail) is the agency responsible for the attraction and retention of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) into Ireland. The agency was founded in 1949 as the ...

) to provide consultancy services to Irish companies in various areas including data mining, visualisation, data management and software

development Development or developing may refer to: Arts *Development hell, when a project is stuck in development *Filmmaking, development phase, including finance and budgeting *Development (music), the process thematic material is reshaped * Photograph ...

optimization Mathematical optimization (alternatively spelled ''optimisation'') or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criterion, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfi ...

References

External links

ICHEC web site
{{authority control Supercomputer sites Computational science Research institutes in the Republic of Ireland