EPCC, formerly the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, is a

supercomputing A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

centre based at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

. Since its foundation in 1990, its stated mission has been to ''accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing throughout industry, academia and commerce''. The University has supported

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 multid ...

(HPC) services since 1982. , through EPCC, it supports the UK's national high-end computing system, ARCHER (Advanced Research Computing High End Resource), and the UK Research Data Facility (UK-RDF).

Overview

EPCC's activities include: consultation and

software development Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development invol ...

for

industry Industry may refer to: Economics * Industry (economics), a generally categorized branch of economic activity * Industry (manufacturing), a specific branch of economic activity, typically in factories with machinery * The wider industrial sector ...

and

academia An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary education, secondary or tertiary education, tertiary higher education, higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membershi ...

;

research Research is "creativity, creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge". It involves the collection, organization and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, characterized by a particular att ...

into high-performance computing; hosting advanced computing facilities and supporting their

users Ancient Egyptian roles * User (ancient Egyptian official), an ancient Egyptian nomarch (governor) of the Eighth Dynasty * Useramen, an ancient Egyptian vizier also called "User" Other uses * User (computing), a person (or software) using an ...

;

training Training is teaching, or developing in oneself or others, any skills and knowledge or Physical fitness, fitness that relate to specific practicality, useful Competence (human resources), competencies. Training has specific goals of improving on ...

and

education Education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or fostering skills and character traits. These aims may include the development of understanding, rationality, kindness, and honesty. Va ...

. The Centre offers two Masters programmes: MSc in High-Performance Computing and MSc in High-Performance Computing with Data Science . It is a member of the

Globus Alliance The Globus Alliance is an international association founded by the University of Chicago and the Argonne National Laboratory dedicated to developing fundamental technologies needed to build grid computing infrastructures. The Globus Alliance was ...

and, through its involvement with the OGSA-DAI project, it works with the

Open Grid Forum The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community of users, developers, and vendors for standardization of grid computing. It was formed in 2006 in a merger of the Global Grid Forum and the Enterprise Grid Alliance. The OGF models its process on the In ...

DAIS-WG. Around half of EPCC's annual turnover comes from collaborative projects with industry and commerce. In addition to privately funded projects with businesses, EPCC receives funding from

Scottish Enterprise Scottish Enterprise is a non-departmental public body of the Scottish Government which encourages economic development, enterprise, innovation and investment in business. The body covers the eastern and central parts of Scotland whilst similar ...

, the

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a British Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research and postgraduate degrees in engineering and the physical sciences, mainly to universi ...

and the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body o ...

History

EPCC was established in 1990, following on from the earlier

Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer Project The Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer (ECS) was a large Meiko Computing Surface supercomputer. This transputer-based, massively parallel system was installed at the University of Edinburgh during the late 1980s and early 1990s. History Follow ...

and chaired by

Jeffery Collins Jeff Collins (22 April 1930 – 23 September 2015) was a British electrical engineer who directed and researched experimental physics, robotics, microelectronics, communications technologies and EPCC, parallel computing. Moving between academi ...

from 1991. From 2002 to 2016 EPCC was part of the University's School of Physics & Astronomy, becoming an independent Centre of Excellence within the University's College of Science and Engineering in August 2016. It was extensively involved in all aspects of

Grid computing Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from co ...

including: developing Grid

middleware Middleware is a type of computer software that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to implement co ...

and

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...

tools to facilitate the uptake of

e-Science E-Science or eScience is computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments, or science that uses immense data sets that require grid computing; the term sometimes includes technologies that enable dist ...

; developing business applications and collaborating in scientific applications and demonstration projects. The Centre was a founder member of the UK's National e-Science Centre (NeSC), the hub of Grid and e-Science activity in the UK. EPCC and NeSC were both partners in

OMII-UK OMII-UK is an open-source software organisation for the UK research community. OMII-UK have a number of roles within the UK research community: helping new users get started with E-research, providing the software that is needed and developing t ...

, which offers consultancy and products to the UK e-Science community. EPCC was also a founder partner of the Numerical Algorithms and Intelligent Software Centre (NAIS). EPCC has hosted a variety of

supercomputers A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions p ...

over the years, including several

Meiko Computing Surface Meiko Scientific Ltd. was a British supercomputer company based in Bristol, founded by members of the design team working on the Inmos transputer microprocessor. History In 1985, when Inmos management suggested the release of the transputer be ...

s, a

Thinking Machines Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the Massachuset ...

CM-200

Connection Machine A Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers that grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computers by Danny Hillis at Massachusetts Institute of Techno ...

, and a number of

Cray Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed ...

systems including a

Cray T3D The T3D (''Torus, 3-Dimensional'') was Cray Research's first attempt at a massively parallel supercomputer architecture. Launched in 1993, it also marked Cray's first use of another company's microprocessor. The T3D consisted of between 32 and 204 ...

and T3E.

High-performance computing facilities

EPCC manages a collection of HPC systems including ARCHER (the UK's national high-end computing system) and a variety of smaller HPC systems. These systems are all available for industry use on a pay-per-use basis. Current systems hosted by EPCC include: * ARCHER2: As of 2021, the ARCHER2 facility is based around a HPE Cray EX supercomputer that provides the central computational resource, with an estimated peaks performance of 28 Peta

FLOPS In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...

. ARCHER 2 runs the HPE Cray Linux Environment, which is based on the

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SUSE Linux Enterprise (often abbreviated to SLE) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for servers and mainframes, and Desktop (SLED) for workstations and desktop compu ...

15. *

Blue Gene/Q Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption. The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, ...

: As of 2013, this system consists of 6144 compute nodes housed in 6 frames. Each node comprises a 16 core Powerpc64 A2 processor, with 16GB memory per node, giving a total of 98,304 cores and a peak performance of 1.26 PetaFlops. It is part of the Distributed Research utilising Advanced Computing (DiRAC) consortium. Recent systems hosted by EPCC include: * ARCHER: From 2014 to 2020, the EPCC hosted the ARCHER facility. ARCHER was a

Cray XC30 The Cray XC30 is a massively parallel multiprocessor supercomputer manufactured by Cray. It consists of Intel Xeon processors, with optional Nvidia Tesla or Xeon Phi accelerators, connected together by Cray's proprietary "Aries" interconnect, s ...

supercomputer. It is supported by a number of additional components including: high-performance parallel filesystems, pre- and post-processing facilities, external login nodes, and UK-RDF, a large, resilient, long-term data facility. ARCHER ran the Cray Linux Environment (CLE), a Linux distribution based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). ARCHER was to be replaced in early 2020 but that was delayed by it being used for research on the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

. During May 2020 it was taken offline as a result of a security incident. The ARCHER service ended on 27th January 2021. During May 2020 it was taken offline as a result of a security incident. *

HECToR In Greek mythology, Hector (; grc, Ἕκτωρ, Hektōr, label=none, ) is a character in Homer's Iliad. He was a Trojan prince and the greatest warrior for Troy during the Trojan War. Hector led the Trojans and their allies in the defense o ...

: The 2010 system (Phase 2b, XT6) was the first production Cray XT6 24-core system in the world. It was contained in 20 cabinets and comprised a total of 464 compute blades. Each blade contained four compute nodes, each with two 12-core AMD Opteron 2.1 GHz Magny Cours processors. This amounted to a total of 44,544 cores. Each 12-core socket was coupled with a Cray SeaStar2 routing and communications chip. This was upgraded in late 2010 to the Cray Gemini interconnect. Each 12-core processor shared 16Gb of memory, giving a system total of 59.4 Tb. The theoretical peak performance of the phase 2b system was over 360 Tflops. HECToR was decommissioned in 2014. *

HPCx HPCx was a supercomputer (actually a computer cluster, cluster of IBM IBM System p, eServer p5 575 high-performance servers) located at the Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, England. The supercomputer was maintained by the HPCx Consortium, UoE HP ...

: Launched in 2002, when it was ranked ninth-fastest system in the world. HPCx was an IBM eServer p5 575

cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Asteroid cluster, a small asteroid family * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study t ...

, located at

Daresbury Laboratory Daresbury Laboratory is a scientific research laboratory based at Sci-Tech Daresbury campus near Daresbury in Halton, Cheshire, England. The laboratory began operations in 1962 and was officially opened on 16 June 1967 as the Daresbury Nuclear ...

. It latterly operated under the complementarity capability computing scheme, preferably hosting workload which can not easily be accommodated on the HECToR system. EPCC supported the HPCx and HECToR systems on behalf of the UK research councils, making them available to UK academics and industry. *

Blue Gene Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption. The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, ...

: Launched in 2005, EPCC's Blue Gene/L was the first Blue Gene system available outside the United States. EPCC operated this 2048-compute core service for the University of Edinburgh. * QCDOC: One of the world's most powerful systems dedicated to the numerical investigation of

quantum chromodynamics In theoretical physics, quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the theory of the strong interaction between quarks mediated by gluons. Quarks are fundamental particles that make up composite hadrons such as the proton, neutron and pion. QCD is a type ...

, which describes the interactions between

quarks A quark () is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. All commonly o ...

and

gluons A gluon ( ) is an elementary particle that acts as the exchange particle (or gauge boson) for the strong force between quarks. It is analogous to the exchange of photons in the electromagnetic force between two charged particles. Gluons bind qu ...

. It was developed in collaboration with a consortium of UK lattice physicists (UKQCD),

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

(NY), Riken Brookhaven National Laboratory and IBM. * Maxwell: Maxwell was an innovative, award-winning

FPGA A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturinghence the term '' field-programmable''. The FPGA configuration is generally specified using a hardware de ...

-based supercomputer built by the FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance (FHPCA). Maxwell comprised 32 blades housed in an

IBM BladeCenter The IBM BladeCenter was IBM's blade server architecture, until it was replaced by Flex System in 2012. The x86 division was later sold to Lenovo in 2014. History Introduced in 2002, based on engineering work started in 1999, the IBM eServe ...

. Each blade comprised one

Xeon Xeon ( ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same arc ...

processor and two FPGAs. The FPGAs were connected by a fast communication subsystem which enabled the total of 64 FPGAs to be connected together in an 8×8

toroid In mathematics, a toroid is a surface of revolution with a hole in the middle. The axis of revolution passes through the hole and so does not intersect the surface. For example, when a rectangle is rotated around an axis parallel to one of its ...

al mesh. The processors were connected together via a

PCI PCI may refer to: Business and economics * Payment card industry, businesses associated with debit, credit, and other payment cards ** Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, a set of security requirements for credit card processors * Pro ...

bus.

References

External links

EPCC

Projects at EPCC
{{authority control Computational science Computer science institutes in the United Kingdom Information technology organisations based in the United Kingdom Research institutes in Edinburgh Supercomputer sites University of Edinburgh

Overview

History

High-performance computing facilities

See also

References

External links